Comment by perching_aix

1 day ago

PR so thick, the page failed to load the first time I opened it, and the comments still continue to fail to load. Absolutely hilarious. Though that may be just GitHub having a normal one, hard to tell these days.

1 009 257 lines added

4024 lines removed

6755 commits

2188 files touched

I haven't the slightest clue how anyone would even remotely hope to review this. I guess by just using even more AI? Or maybe by throwing some über hardcore lint pass onto it? It really seems like more an exercise in risk assessment than code review.

The maddening thing is that there's a right way to do this if you have the patience and professionalism to do so. It requires building a bit of scaffolding (feature flags, cross-language calling support, harnesses for shadow testing, etc.), then you ship-of-theseus the codebase incrementally. This is not even incompatible with LLM-assistance, plus it breaks the thing up into smaller, reviewable changes that don't break your diff tool!

However, doing it the right way takes a bit more time, involves community feedback, and doesn't produce headlines about huge codebases being rewritten by LLMs in just a few days, so ...

  • There is never a right way, only trade offs.

    The thing about being a Monday morning quarterback is that you can always claim you would have used even more caution and process.

    • > you can always claim you would have used even more caution and process.

      Well, specifically, my claim is that any serious professional in this industry would have done so. But we're essentially in agreement, in the sense that yes, I am allowed to make this claim, and in fact already did, in the comment you are replying to.

      EDIT: Actually I've been thinking about this a bit more. The thing about commenting on something that someone did is that you must always comment on it after they did it, otherwise it wasn't "something they did." However, being a "Monday morning quarterback", as I understand it in this context, means "criticism of someone's actions afterwards", so it would appear that I am doing that. I also understand this phrase to have a negative connotation, and I would hate to connote negatively in this otherwise very positive community. Quite a dilemma! Glad I have my life coach LLM to help me sort all this out.

      1 reply →

    • > There is never a right way, only trade offs.

      There is a right way, especially when you have a community.

    • Can you cite a single software project with so many users which did a language migration in a more cavalier way?

    • I mean, some trade-offs are “something for nothing” which by definition makes them “the wrong way.”

      Real life does exist.

Not sure there is much of a point in reviewing a port of this size. It has >1000 instances of `unsafe` and uses the same patterns as the zig code according to Jarred. It feels like a vibe-ported version of what the TypeScript team are doing porting from TypeScript > Go with codemods.

Humans are no longer maintaining bun. There is no good faith argument that can claim a human understands this rewrite