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Comment by nkmnz

2 days ago

So it was possible to write ~2 million lines of (mostly) zig, but it's not possible to review ~1 million lines of rust, even though the same test suite included in those 2 million lines of zig can still be used? I'm not convinced the rewrite is a good idea and will work out, but I'm equally unconvinced by your argument.

Its possible to do that over a period of a few years. Sadly, the Rust rewrite happened in (checks notes) 8 days.

  • So this question was never answered: If Zig had so may problems that they felt compelled to rewrite it all in Rust, does that suggest the great Mythos was unable to fix the Zig version?

    Isn't this suppose to be the most advanced model ever and you're telling me they can't just schedule a cron job that detects and repairs the zig version?

    Really? Did they just completely admit that the great AI future can't secure a significant project repository?

    • AI is extremely good at rewriting existing code, and rewriting code is a classic engineering productivity trap. That's a tale as old as time; "we need to rewrite the api in Go" said every new midlevel engineering hire ever. Of course, 9 times out of 10 we don't do it, because the unpredictable costs always outweigh the benefit, and in Jarred's case we're starting to see these costs surface. They aren't technical, they're political; broad swaths of the community have lost faith in him and the Bun project.

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    • I was thinking along similar lines today. An AI assisted audit of the issues that caused segfaults could find and implement safe memory management patterns in Zig. It sounds like the Rust port process essentially has had to do this anyway when it analyzed all of the places unsafe is needed and started mitigating some of them. The project also sounds like it has unique memory management problems in its nature: native code calling js code which calls native code and trying to manage lifetimes amongst that.

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It should go without saying that the 2 million lines of zig wasn't generated and shat out into the Bun repo as a single PR within a week.