Comment by zarzavat
2 days ago
What is the essence of a program?
The name? No.
The author? No.
The test suite? No, testing is hard and most projects don't do enough of it.
The code? Not really, code can be rewritten.
The history of the program being executed by its users? Ding ding ding. Yes, it's this one.
Bun no longer exists. What exists now is a program that has the potential to be Bun but at this time is not Bun because it has no history of being executed as Bun.
If the rewrite has been done piece-by-piece or over a longer time period then this history could have been built up over time. As such we will have to wait a while for Bun to exist again.
i highly disagree with that framing. the essence of a program is not the fact that people have been running it
you could write a great program and never run it. does that mean the program does now not exist? or that it is not a new, unique thing?
if anything, the essence of a program is made up by all of the things you mentioned!
The confidence and trust accumulated by the users is paramount. I think that’s what we are talking about here.
That does not define a program, that sounds more like it defines a "product" which a product can be free.
The essence of a program is all of those things. The omission of any one of them makes a program almost worthless.
It's an competitor to bun at the moment, that's what happens when you rewrite a whole program.
Name being the same or not, it's what it is in reality (for better or worse)