Comment by dfabulich

3 hours ago

This blog post further undermines my trust in Jarred.

He makes it sound like Claude did a fantastic Rust rewrite, and "the work continues."

But when the Rust port merged to main, the state of the code was very, very bad. There were 13,000 instances of `unsafe`, no Miri tests at all, and, sure enough, it exposed UB in safe Rust. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226

Just 9 days before he merged the Rust rewrite to the main branch, Jarred wrote:

> This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.

It's plausible that Bun's Rust rewrite is now in much better shape than it was in May. But a blog post like this would have been a place to apologize, to accept that it was a very bumpy rollout, to acknowledge that public messaging was extremely poor, and to earn back our trust.

As it stands, I guess I'll have to run my own tests to try to evaluate whether Bun 1.4 is ready for prime time, because I just can't trust Jarred to give us a straight answer.

Pre-release code had bugs that were fixed before the release? Why is that a problem? That's the point of having a testing and release process

> But when the Rust port merged to main, the state of the code was very, very bad. There were 13,000 instances of `unsafe`, no Miri tests at all, and, sure enough, it exposed UB in safe Rust.

I mean yeah, that's what this whole post is about. It's about the process of going from that original state to something that's now shipping in production.

> We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.

God forbid an engineer express uncertainty.

  • Uncertainty is one thing, but a high chance means it’s 51% or higher to me.

    Based on that, the bun rewrite messaging was fairly misleading.

    • That was their estimate at the time, based off the information they had. You can't ask more of someone than that.

      Either they estimated poorly, or it ended up the lesser portion of their estimate after all. After all, unless the estimate is 100%, there's always a chance it'll fall into the other portion.

    • To understand your error, consider that in the month leading up to the 2016 US presidential election, the widely-accepted probabilities were between 70% (Five-Thirty-Eight) and 90% (Reuters) in favour of Clinton.