I have learned so much reading Andrew’s code and as I said in the original post: Bun would never have happened without Zig.
> The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.
Yes, "their" refers to Bun's code, not the Zig compiler's code. Fuzzili is a fuzzing engine for JavaScript, so integrating it into Bun means that Fuzzili is fuzzing Bun.[0]
From the Bun post[1]
> We fuzz Bun's runtime APIs 24/7 using Fuzzilli, the JavaScript engine fuzzer used by V8 & JavaScriptCore
From Andrew Kelley's post today[2]:
> The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.
Sumner says that the Bun team has been fuzzing Bun's Zig code. Kelley says that this is a fabrication. Sumner showed proof that the Bun team has been fuzzing Bun's Zig code.
It looks like Kelley is incorrect and made an unfounded claim. The generous interpretation is that at the time Kelley and Sumner had a more collaborative relationship, Sumner was not fuzzing Bun's Zig code, but I'd expect Kelley to check if anything had changed since then before publicly accusing Sumner of lying in this week's Bun blog post.
Your links show you used a fuzzer, but that doesn't address the other half of Andrew's statement. Is Andrew misreporting/misremembering your conversations?
EDIT: It's really telling that asking a factual clarification question is somehow downvote worthy. I probably shouldn't be surprised, but this epitomizes the reason online discussions devolve in to flame wars (even moreso than real life, though it happens more and more there as well).
The answer could be as simple as we didn't use a fuzzer until recently so both are accurate. I honestly don't know, which is why I'm asking. Yet somehow just asking is triggering to people.
I have no buns to pick here in this discussion really, but doesn't it strike you as slightly pointless to specifically address one particularity of Andrew's blog post while not addressing a single other thing from it, or maybe try to move one step up to about the discussion itself, or something else?
Again, I have no dog in this fight, I "worship" neither of you, I'm just curious about the whole conversation apparently degrading rather than anyone of you trying to step in a different direction.
You want to see him address being "a stinky manager", having "beginner energy", choosing to take VC as opposed to "a solid living via crowdfunding", or "already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs"?
Those are all opinions where arguing about them isn't going to be productive.
Countering the accusation of "an outright fabrication" on the other hand is worthwhile because it's a claim that can be countered.
If somebody called me a liar for something that demonstrably wasn't a lie I wouldn't let that stand, either.
Bun donates $60,000 per year [month] and Jarred acts with graciousness and soft tones when talking to outside parties. Why do you think it's Jarred's obligation to continue after being insulted for professional dishonesty?
Isn't it Andrew's obligation to show that he was worth that much kindness to begin with?
Without having any opinion on whether or not the Bun team was meaningfully fuzzing their codebase... Andrew's claim was not about whether or not they were, it was noting that the story was different between what they claimed in conversation and what they stated in this article.
I know very little about Jared but his article yesterday, which I read, seemed appreciative of Zig. I now learn he's donated significant chunks of money to them.
This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product.
It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig when it really just makes them look childish. Or maybe he doesn't care, and just wants to attack Jarred?
How is it unprofessional when it is simply someone giving their honest personal opinion on an issue that involves something that is valuable to them, on their personal blog nonetheless.
Is everyone a walking and talking brand now so that they have to always filter their words, walk on eggshells, hide behind corpo-speak so as to seem 'professional'?
More honest discourse is required in today's world, not less. It seems interactions online are becoming less and less authentic.
> Those people talked to each other. Everybody talked to everybody. The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.
There’s a big gap between corpo speak and “stinky manager”. That’s nowhere close to professional writing. And he’s not giving us his personal opinion, Kelley is telling us the conclusion of the “grape vine” - he’s reporting on rumors and gossip, and agreeing with it.
> This is unprofessional and embarrassing for Zig.
It is. It's also why Anthropic and Bun moved off Zig.
Zig is effectively a one-man show, and that one man has been making increasingly erratic decisions.
It's his project so it's well within his rights, of course. But when you're a ~trillion dollar company you don't want to get hit by a supply chain risk like this.
For Anthropic, it's better to nip this in the bud rather than invest more into the Zig ecosystem, where there's a demonstrated risk of the not-so-BDFL going off the rails.
> It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig when it really just makes them look childish.
Antirez made a post equivalent to: you'd be a fool not to use AI to increase test coverage.
Zig on the other hand has embarrassingly low test coverage given its adoption and time in development.
Their stance on AI is completely childish. They could benefit massively from it, yet refuse to even consider any potential usage.
It's one thing to try to stop PR spam. It's another thing to tie your hands behind your back and not even use it internally for the lowest hanging fruit where it could have major benefits.
They could use AI to triage potential real bugs from PR spam... but instead they just let real bugs go unnoticed for longer than need be because they won't even use AI to help triage...
I am fine with people having principles and doing things their way. Not everything has to be a race to be the best. There are still plenty of people that appreciate traditional crafts. Anyway, if Zig+AI can be the next, greatest thing, can't someone just fork it and make it happen?
> This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product
The article seems to be happy about the switch to Rust, that point is re-iterated multiple times in the article, and seemingly they were both awaiting Bun moving away from Zig and wishing for it.
I feel the same way as you do. Honestly, even though it was well-packaged, I did find it a bit rude. But since I don't know their personal relationship, it's not really my place to interfere.
Agreed. This article should have stuck to the cold facts, rather than a series of personal criticisms that you wouldn’t see written out in the workplace.
Sadly there are far too many open source developers out there who are far too comfortable writing like this. It’s one reason I have stopped being active in open source. You would be fired (or at least disciplined) from any reasonable workplace if you acted like this.
you are right, to many people feel far to comfortable writing like this. but my reaction is to double down and be more active to counter this kind of expression and make it clear that this is not welcome. it worked with linus torvalds.
No, it's embarrassing being obsessed with good tone to the point that people behaving badly should never be called out for it.
The article provides good background into how it got to this point - and it fits well with doing an opportunistic AI rewrite after being acquired by an AI provider.
It is not about good tone it's about not being hateful and rude. Why is this that hard to pick apart?
Why do devs believe being rude is somehow a sign of honesty? They are orthogonal. This post needed none of the mean-spirited attacks that it contained to make its points. It is only hurt by the attacks as seen by the focus on "tone" throughout these comments.
The argument isn't to avoid calling out "bad" behaviour, it's that you can do so with a professional (or at least not actively childish) tone. Using phrases like "stinky manager" while taking multiple jabs at Jarred's personal and educational background (implying by not going to university he was too stupid to think critically about his path forward) paints a weirdly childish yet elitist viewpoint. The blog post reads as vindictive, akin to something along the lines of "screw you kid, glad to be rid of you, and thanks for the $120,000 btw."
I don't interact with Zig or Bun, but I certainly haven't been enticed to try Zig after this.
It's kind of strange to not engage with any of the points made in the article. Unlike you, I don't think the post makes them look childish at all. I think it raises a lot of valid points and makes me want to use Zig more.
> It's kind of strange to not engage with any of the points made in the article. Unlike you, I don't think the post makes them look childish at all. I think it raises a lot of valid points and makes me want to use Zig more.
I know nothing about the drama here other than what's in the blog post, but these feel more like unnecessarily public personal attacks which don't really reflect well:
- a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective
- already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
- their vague "sell some cloud something" business plan was a farce
FWIW I was really interested in Zig and now I see that its lead developer is thin-skinned and bitter and has confused minimal criticism of his project with an attack on his person.
This is such a bad look and it's also flatly self-contradictory. He spends time in his conclusion asserting he doesn't have any personal criticisms of Jarred but he's fully happy to claim, reframe and repeat everyone else's, even criticisms he evidently heard in private.
You can also see that it was incompletely rewritten from a pure, personalised and personally-directed rant: "I noticed that you…" does not belong with the rest of the text.
Whatever the merits of Claude-driven rewrites (I suspect few, long-term), the article he is responding to has little to none of the vituperative quality of his own.
I think if it needed a response, and I was this angry, I would have written this whole post as a draft, filed it away in Apple Notes, and then posted "I have, yes, seen the article on the Bun blog; you don't need to send me it anymore! I will respond to parts of it in the future as and when they are particularly relevant."
Writing the response post can be valuable as emotional release or exploration. Posting it in this sprawling, mean form was dumb.
The points in the article aren't great. It opens up personal and stays personal. As people in this thread have pointed out, several of the falsifiable bits turn out to be false.
The big thing though is, you get to the end of it and have to ask: why did this need to be written at all?
"It's almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article."
He does get that Anthropic is Don Draper in the elevator meme here, right?
Yes, perhaps Jarred is professionally dishonest, making up fake conversations about Zig. That is the most salient point in the whole article, and Jarred shows up to simply post receipts with kind words and minimal commentary.
Would you like to discuss that point as a fellow professional in the field?
> I now learn he's donated significant chunks of money to them.
Biting the hand that feeds you might make you an asshole. But sometimes you have to be an asshole to uphold standards and principles. I don't think Linus or Jobs would be known to produce such important technology if they don't care enough about their works to act crudely to people they consider substandard.
We can disagree with Andrew's standards of course. But saying he should not attack someone just because he took money from him is a weak criticism.
I don't think it's too bad, but I also don't think it's good.
I also don't think Andrew can claim at the end "I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred" when the post includes the sentence "Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs".
> It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig
I'm not sure that's his aim here. I imagine he has been asked dozens of times what he thinks about the switch, what it means for Zig, etc. etc. and wanted to just address it one time, which is understandable.
The tone is... strong. I think repeating grapevine rumours about Jarred's management skills adds very little and probably could have been removed. But at its heart I see this post as example of a common clash: open source code hackers vs Silicon Valley "growth hackers".
Kelley is disappointed that a promising Zig project took VC money and went from his passion project's prime example to one that shit talked it on the way out. I get why he's emotional. I wouldn't have written it the way he did but I also don't think policing tone is beneficial for honest communication.
There are entire businesses built on sharing "through the grapevine" what management style and working conditions are like at various employers. People want to know these things!
Instead of posting on Glassdoor or whatever the latest iteration of that is, Andrew just wrote it out here (and linked to a forum to back up the claim).
Isn't this what makes it so strange, though? You didn't see K&R publish "so-and-so writes bad C", or Stroustrup decrying the Boost maintainers as hacks. Linus used to do this sort of thing, but mostly to things that directly affected the kernel, and even that eventually led to changed behavior and a code of conduct.
The post disclaims the ambassador relationship, but treats Bun as having all of the responsibility of being an ambassador anyway. If Bun is in Zig's house, like the monthly meetings and the core team code review suggest, then somehow the outcome reflects on Zig. If not, then that's fine, but then it begins and ends at "They were a project written in Zig, and now they're not". He can't have both "It's their fault because their code was slop" and "it's not my business".
While organizing his thoughts publicly, Andrew says that the Bun team at large engages in outright fabrication. What do we think about that? Does Jarred and his team lie about professional matters to fellow peers in the field?
"An unprofessional embarrassment" is exactly how I feel about Bun.
I don't get mad at people for standing up for their morals, I get mad when they have none. AI is an a-moral tech, and Bun is using it in an a-moral way: for team Bun the ends justify any means.
This behaviour by the commentariat here on HN seems more like a reflexive revulsion at the discovering of humans with ideals other than money on this globe.
This of course leads to strong internal conflict - it becomes harder to accept yourself not having any morals when confronted by someone pointing it out. Easily resolved by the ego by disparaging the boss of zed instead.
Unprofessional? Maybe a little, but honest, and while the truth isn't flattering to Jarred, I'd say generally kind.
Embarrassing? Not from my seat. Andrew is just revealing the relationship dynamics between a principled programming language developers and pragmatic business users of that language.
I had already inferred a bunch that this post confirms based on the agentic port from forked-Zig to Rust. It's very nice to have suspicions confirmed.
How is it kind to imply that by not going to university, Jarred was too stupid to think critically about his own path in life? Or just this in its entirety: "Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective."
We have very different ideas about what kindness looks like. Honesty and rudeness are not synonyms.
Before the post I didn't know what zig and bun is. I needed a llm to explain it to me. Now I think about trying Zig. So, no, I don't think it's childish. It reads like a engineer that knows which kind of people you don't need in your environment. I can feel every word he wrote because I know this situations.
> This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product.
Well, TFA has a conveniently titled section "Addressing the Blog Post", that raises (setting aside speculation) some good points:
The [Bun rewrite] blog post is ... almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article ...
There's a dichotomy being presented here where you have to either choose a "style guide" or a programming language feature in order to avoid bugs. The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it ...
[TigerBeetle] put in the time to find and eliminate the bugs, they make an effort to maintain a healthy relationship with ZSF, and Bun did not do that.
The argument for shipping all the million lines of unreviewed code is that the test suite is good enough to catch everything. Then why are you saying you have so many annoying bugs in the Zig code? What happened to the test suite being sufficient to catch everything ...
Performance increase is attributed to LTO, which Zig has supported for all of Bun's existence. It used to be enabled by default until we ran into too many LLVM bugs, all of which also affect Rust ...
The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.
The blog post outlines a bunch of engineering work done to reduce binary size, to better make the case that "Bun is better in Rust" ... you were doing the engineering work that you should have done in the Zig codebase since the beginning ...
I noticed that you neglected to mention compilation speed. Zig compiler project is about 600,000 lines of code - roughly the same size as Bun before the rewrite, and I'm clocking 16s to build from scratch with a clean cache, followed by 90ms for each subsequent edit with incremental compilation enabled. What are the corresponding measurements of Bun post-rewrite?
> Or maybe he doesn't care, and just wants to attack Jarred?
I've worked with ark enough that I think I've started to learn his default style, or at the very least to know that from him; this isn't an attack. If that was your read, I think you're taking more from sources that aren't this post.
I wonder if you're confusing statements of fact, for attacks? They're distinct, and the context for the post. I'm sure he's been asked a few, hundred, times what's his take on this decision made by this single person.
> Two, I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred. He has different taste than me, he wants different things out of life than me. [...] Honestly, I think he did well for himself, and I don't wish him any ill will.
> That said I'm happy that our business interests are no longer intertwined! As soon as the Internet stops arguing in public about whether the rewrite was good or bad for Bun based on the language choice, I believe that concludes our interactions.
Translation, Jarred posted his thing, so now Andrew "has" to post his thing: hopefully so the internet will stop asking, and he can ignore this shit he doesn't care about, and people will leave him alone long enough that he can get back to spending his attention on his language, which is all he really wants.
> I've worked with ark enough that I think I've started to learn his default style, or at the very least to know that from him; this isn't an attack. If that was your read, I think you're taking more from sources that aren't this post.
You start by taking more from sources that aren’t this post, then in the very next sentence accuse the other person of doing what you just admitted to.
This article has very clear attacks like calling him a “stinky manager” from literal gossip, or saying he wrote “slop” before LLMs.
If you can’t see these as personal attacks, you are taking more from other sources and your predetermined opinions than the article. That is what you admitted, but I don’t think you realize it.
> I wonder if you're confusing statements of fact, for attacks?
Hearsay and gossip from the "juicy grape vine" along with implying Jarred is too stupid to critically think about his own path in life because he didn't go to university are not exactly statements of fact. They're elitist and vindictive, but those are not synonymous with honest.
> If that was your read, I think you're taking more from sources that aren't this post.
I'd encourage you to reread the post and try to catch how weirdly spiteful and inconsistent it sounds in places:
> But having graduated from the Thiel Fellowship school of thought rather than university...
> Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective.
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.
> Now, it's not our business to police what our users do... We made futile attempts to guide them towards better programming practices.
This isn’t like the official stance of the zig foundation or anything. I for one am happy to see people being honest about their frustrations instead of playing politics.
I agree and I’m confused that some other commenters aren’t seeing it.
> The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.
This isn’t about wanting “sanitized corpo-speak” or something, but I do expect leads of projects to behave like adults and not build arguments on ad-hominem attacks and rumors they supposedly heard.
Address the topic and put forth some arguments. I don’t care to hear your personal beef with someone aired publicly.
> Two, I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred
That’s quite a statement to make at the end of a post that seems to contain little else…all just thinly veiled.
Saying someone has „beginner energy“ but reframing it as a faux positive (this person fails and thus learns)
Or saying the grapevine says someone is a „stinky manager“? Basically I’m not saying this person is bad it’s just that I need to bring up on this blog that everyone agrees this person is bad.
I'm quite confused by this. Is calling someone a "stinky manager" a personal attack? It's funny that we can't differentiate the person from his "job". I work with some shitty managers, but I don't hold it against them on a personal level...
It may be hard to separate the work and non-work personas of Jarred in particular. I watched an interview with Jarred where the interviewer asked what he liked to do for fun, what were his hobbies outside of work, and so on. His answer was that he liked working on Bun, and that's all he did. I felt a bit sad for him about it: even Linus T. has hobbies (like diving) and has raised a family.
That said, it isn't necessarily the case that workaholics are bad managers, or that they insist on workaholism in their subordinates. We, generally, don't have access to Andrew's rumornet, we can only go off what Jarred's said publicly.
You do your job for hours every week, it is undoubtedly part of you. Calling somebody that is very personal and rude. I'm shocked that there are this many people who don't find issue with it. It removes any kindness from the post and turns it all up to 11. I's deeply personal.
Do some of you really talk to others like this and find no issue with it? It's hard to say words like that and not end up with deep schisms and hatred.
Don’t think there is a clear line to draw as to where the person stops and the professional performance starts when it comes to management because on soft skill it is inherently driven by personal attributes. It’s a bit like a good salesman exudes likeability - it’s integral to the performance of the job and part of the person.
He may well be a shit manager. I have no idea. Either way it’s not something you casually throw out there in a blog like this
It’s an inconsistent statement to make when the rest of the article contains ad hominem attacks like these:
> The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.
This is a weirdly childish post. I enjoy a good post where someone speaks their mind without running it through the corporate speak filter first, but it also gives you insights into how a person thinks and operates. With good leadership you can strip away the corporate filter and the result is still professional, but this article reveals something much less than professional
Beginner energy is faux? I relish my beginner energy in all my side projects - I fail and learn. This is completely normal when done safely and without people depending on you. Unlike management.
> So, when the Anthropic aquisition finally happened, we at ZSF breathed a sigh of relief. When the donation silently stopped, our bank account was ready for it. When they neither canceled their monthly meeting with us, nor showed up, we were not surprised. The relationship was over.
Seen this time and time again, project/organization gets taken over, and everything "good" they did doesn't get exited with fanfare or anything, just silently dropped as your benefactor starts silently ignoring you.
I'm really happy they saw the writing on the all and were prepared for the inevitable, a really great lesson you shouldn't need to learn yourself the hard way, and FOSS project relying on one/two big donators should take heed, we'll see a lot more of this in the developer tooling ecosystem moving forward for sure.
There are astute comments about the post's tone elsewhere in this thread[0]
But this killed my hopes for Zig.
The drama is fun, and Andrew is maybe even admirable in his earnest, but this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project. I know that's boring and uninspired, but that's what I want my tech stack and it's management to be.
Also, maybe Jarred was a net negative, but bun was also a really big project using Zig, and the project leaving isn't as good for Zig as Andrew is making it seem. It genuinely seems he's putting a lot of priority on purity and ideology over just growth of the language. And I am sorry, but adoption and reaching critical mass is an important part of a serious programming language.
> this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project
I don't immediately see how much the seriousness of the project is related to the language the author chose in their personal blog post. It's similar to saying that Linux could not have become a serious project because of the way Linus communicated in his emails.
> It's similar to saying that Linux could not have become a serious project because of the way Linus communicated in his emails.
Linus being rude was actually contributing for Linux becoming a serious project. Because that changed the quality of the code and the seriousness of the contributions. If you were sloppy or did not do good job, Linus became rude. So there is a correlation, and this is an excellent demonstration how it goes to opposite direction. Whether it was professional or not, it correlated for the quality of the project. For that reason, it is not ad hominem.
Linus always backs up his insults with technical reasonings on why the other side is wrong though. You might not agree with his reasons, but at least he provided them.
He is understandably annoyed. It feels like you are making it a problem for people to have emotions and give signs that they have those emotions. He didn’t even write anything direct and it is on his personal blog
In what way the article convinced you that Andrew Kelley is not professional enough for a serious project like Zig? Isn't his contribution to the language what's important?
He's leading the community. Not having basic professional does indeed kill them vibe for some of us. When is he going to pile on somebody else he disagrees with?
> this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project
I actually think this gets to, but steps over, the core objection: traditional "hacker" mindset vs VC "growth hacking" mindset.
> And I am sorry, but adoption and reaching critical mass is an important part of a serious programming language.
Why? Why can't he create a language with exactly the kind of purity and ideology he wants, broader adoption be damned? Why must everything optimize for user growth and mindshare?
> And I am sorry, but adoption and reaching critical mass is an important part of a serious programming language.
Would you argue that Chez Scheme (to pick a random example) isn't a "serious programming language"? And I am sorry, but the assumption that "explosive growth" in the venture capital sense is somehow necessary for "success" is cancer.
linus torvalds was eventually told that his tone was not acceptable and that he needed to learn to tone it down. linux grew despite linus tone, not because of it.
I found this post very refreshing! I’m sure it would have been very tempting to one-up the “PR-speak” of the Bun post. Likewise, it would have been very tempting to include the same set of facts that reflect negatively on Jarred, while studiously concealing one’s own opinion (eg “I heard people called him a stinky manager. I am not saying that, other people are, but I’m not”). I appreciated that it was just … genuine.
I don't think you are using that right. Saying someone is bringing a bad vibe to your project, as the point he has a bad vibe is just stating the conclusion.
Like if someone calls you a bad programmer and doesn't hire you as a programmer, isn't ad hominem
Part of it might feel like ad hominem, but I think the bluntness is justified in this case. It provides some pretty important context on the situation.
As an outside observer who knew little about Zig and Bun, the impression I got is that the rewrite came out of nowhere, and that the Zig community was surprised by it. The post makes it quite clear that this wasn't the case, and describes how the actions and overall mentality of Bun's creator already suggested such a thing was likely to happen, straight from the mouth of someone who worked with him and isn't afraid to voice his thoughts. Not everything needs to be PR speak.
It's hard, in my opinion, to lend credence to the author here when they decided to devote the first and largest section of their article to an incisive display of speculative ad hominem.
Would have been a great opportunity to outline the benefits of Zig! I've been keen to pick Zig up recently due to mitchellh's evangelism and inspiring writing on the subject.
> first and largest section of their article to an incisive display of speculative ad hominem.
Seems you're not alone in feeling this, mind quoting the exact and verbatim parts that seem like "speculative ad hominem"? I see there are quite a bits about how Andrew sees Jarred and his workflow/work mentality, but I'm not sure I see clearly what is supposed to be the ad hominem, speculative or not.
Not sure a personal attack against Jarred really helps the case for using Zig. He could have and should have focused on the language and not “a stinky manager”. Honestly, this makes me want to steer clear of Andrew as much as Jarred.
Its an attack an Jarred's public, (un)professional behaviour.
One most of us in the community have born witness too in recent months.
"Jarred, in his professional capacity, drove away many from our community, and we'd prefer to disassociate."
is not 'Jarred is a bad person, privately'.
Now, in these circles, that might as well be the same thing, given how little personal life I imagine most VCs have left outside of work. But that's not really Andrew's problem.
I won't defend Andrew's style; I think he could mask some his neurodivergence more when communicating to a wider neurotypical audience. But it's his project, his community is certainly aware, and this too, is a known quantity.
It might help you though, to reread the piece with the assumption that Andrew is being completely sincere, without adding in a secondary subtext like, "Andrew is trying to assassinate Jarred's character".
I think he’s being completely sincere in this attempt to assassinate this person’s character. I say this as someone who before this day regarded Kelley as a role model. Now I see him in the same category as a Musk like character. Don’t blame “unmasked neurodivergence” for this, plenty of neurodivergent people can communicate effectively and professionally to a wide audience without attacking someone’s professional character.
For example, given the number of claims made here there’s very little actual evidence and support. Kelley says Jared is a bad manager and credits rumors. He says he writes slop code and doesn’t provide a single example or prove that statement. If this were his “neurodivergence” coming through I’d expect more thorough argument and less “stinky manager” grade school insults.
Andrew's online social behavior is largely a streak of pettiness imo. This is not even close to the first time I've seen him write something I felt was overtly mean spirited, not just euphemistically "blunt".
Personal and professional are not mutually exclusive.
If I criticize your code, that is a professional criticism.
If I criticize your code and say it reflects your consistent carelessness and stupidity, it is also personal.
If I say you fabricated something, then that is a personal criticism, it alleges an ethical violation. In a professional context, it's also a professional criticism (every profession has some ethical standards).
And literally 3 sentences later he goes back to insulting him ("productivity fantasy fever dream"). Even if that is true, it's still an unwise post to publish in this form IMHO. If the goal was to defend Zig, that could've been done in a less personal manner.
I think he messed that part up and it comes off as passive aggressive but he is probably scared of the “outrage” from the angels of the internet about how rude he was to Jarred
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.
I don't see anything business related in that statement.
What's this new level of gaslighting? "It was not because of me, but because of the business situation I was in". Wait... wasn't he in that "business situation" because of actions HE took?
To me, this whole effort of rewriting Bun from Zig to Rust looks like a big marketing move. The question is: if Anthropic AI is really that powerful, why not just fix the bugs and give it the more ambitious task of redesigning the existing Bun Zig codebase in a way that eliminates not only the current bugs but also prevents similar ones from happening in the future?
It is worth noting that before rewriting in Rust, Bun maintained a fork used to accelerate the compilation and informed those who asked that this fork could never be merged due to Zig's zero-LLM policy.
A few weeks later, Bun began the Rust rewrite. Although not explicitly stated, I suspect these two events may be related.
If you use Rust the way it was designed to be used, rather than relying on countless "unsafe" blocks, you need to redesign the entire codebase architecture to make it compatible with the borrow checker rules.
What a complete own goal. I wouldn't want to have anything to do with Zig if there's a chance the head of the ZSF writes a blog that contains a substantial portion of unsubstantiated, unattributed personal attacks directed toward me.
Maybe Jarred wasn't easy to work with, but that doesn't mean that it's a good idea to publicly air all the dirty laundry. He at least seemed to have his heart in the right place by donating a substantial amount to the project.
> You can imagine how we might want to put some social distance between ourselves and a project whose irresponsible software engineering practices invite the exact kind of criticism that people are eager to level.
The other (very salient) points notwithstanding, I'm afraid this quote shows that Zig hasn't learned a lesson that other languages of its generation (and older) have: if a project's memory safety depends only on "responsible engineering practices", then that project most likely won't be memory safe. Quoting the "swiss cheese" model used in risk management: one slice of cheese (engineering practices) just isn't enough if you want to be reasonably sure your program is memory safe.
I mean, case in point. (One of?) Zig's largest adopted projects who was donating $60,000 a year made by a contributor that worked directly with Andrew... Was not "stinky" engineering.
If Bun can't get it right starting in 2026 with all of Zig's tooling and someone who worked on the language, what hope does my random team have?
Especially when we could, instead, use Rust. With a larger community to boot.
I’m reminded of the hierarchy of controls in machine safety. If you can’t eliminate the hazard, or substitute a less hazardous thing, then engineering out the hazard (like Rust did) is preferable to a procedural control (“git gud at engineering”).
Can you elaborate on the distinction between "eliminate the hazard" as the first choice and "engineering out the hazard" as a fallback approach?
In my safety background (recently aerospace, ARP4754/4761), removing and avoiding the hazard are essentially equivalent, with reducing the likelihood and mitigating its effects acceptable if you can't remove or avoid the hazard, and procedure is also the least preferred mechanism.
C/C++ with static code analysis is not worse than Rust. But most Rust developers are beginners during there are many C/C++ developers with 20+ years knowledge. So whats exactly is the point in using Rust?
C/C++ does not care and they’re currently the language for foundational work (OS, platforms, and libraries). Python and Java does not care, they will just throw runtime exceptions and crash. Rust care, but they don’t play well with the rest of the world.
Despite stated otherwise in the post, this is a personal attack.
Anyway, let's try to discuss something more technical: I predict Zig will lose steam, and in 2027, will lose relevance:
1) It's hardcore Anti-AI
2) It's moved to Codeberg
3) It doesn't have the momentum to sustain the disadvantages of these two decisions
The project will in max 2 years make a blog post, not admitting to their mistakes, telling themselves that Zig is a success, despite the industry having moved on.
They don't have a goal of becoming a popular language, though and will continue to work on it as long as there are donations.
They don't care about being mainstream and there are niche companies who appreciate Zig and donate.
> I'm hustling. I'm playing the game. I'm doing what it takes to make this thing mainstream and a viable, practical choice for individuals and companies. If you talk shit about Zig in public, I'm going to fight back. But I respect you. I see you. I understand you. I don't hate you. I would literally buy you a drink.
Reminds me of another language that I used to know...
For real though, if your goal as a language isn't to become popular then why should anyone learn it? Why should anyone spend their limited time building libraries in it when the language isn't likely to grow (and thus is more likely to disappear)?
To be honest, I'm also leaning this way, especially because of the hardcore anti-AI stance, so much that Zig will close security vulnerability issues on Codeberg if you mention that they were found with LLMs. I don't think that this is a good approach.
I also think Zig has a rough road ahead, but not because of AI or moving to codeberg. No, it's because Andrew isn't really a BDFL. He's at best a DFL. The project is already mostly closed off to external contributors.
It kind of reminds me of Elm in a way. Though I'm not expecting 6 years of drought just yet.
It's a conflict of core values, and you've demonstrated it here.
You have defined success (for a project, and possibly a person too) as solely 'relevance'.
Jarred would agree with you wholeheartedly, I imagine.
Andrew would ask you to leave.
It's okay to have different values and part ways.
It's not wise, however, to project your personal values onto other people, and judge them on those fabricated merits. You'll end up frustrated and confused more often than not.
Judge their choice of values. Judge them on their alignment with their chosen values.
As an example, Andrew doesn't like Jarred's chosen 'Silicon Valley' values, but thinks that Jarred aligns himself well with those values. This feels as a personal attack to you who also holds those values. And on some level, a person intimating you core values suck couldn't be more personal.
One funny thing is that if you go on codeberg and want to submit a PR to Zig, you can't. Because Zig's too big for Codeberg, and you're over your free quota, so you can't push your update to your fork.
Yes there are ways around it if you have patience, but what the heck!!
Your prediction is extremely short sighted, and I can only guess it is because of your extreme pro-AI stance, as well as not being part of the open-source community.
If you bothered to actually learn just a little bit about the Zig project, you'll know that they are doing ok. They never cared about introducing new features at a fast speed, having lots of contributors, or getting corporate sponsorship, if that's not already obvious from the article. In fact, they intentionally keep a distance from all of that to make the project more sustainable and less prone to the whims of corporations.
> The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it.
Perhaps the amount of bugs comes from using a C-like language that requires meticulous manual care to avoid writing runtime bugs.
Even C++ would be a safer choice because of RAII.
When you have to dedicate significant resources to avoid/fix runtime issues that are made impossible at compile time by other languages, the programmer isn't entirely at fault.
Memory safety problems are still possible in the new Rust Bun:
At the time of writing, about 4% of Bun's Rust code sits inside an unsafe block (~13,000 unsafe keywords across ~27,000 lines / ~780,000 lines), and 78% of those blocks are a single line — a pointer that came from C++, or one call into a C library.
People bring this up a lot. What I see here is that thousands of potentially (not actually, just potentially) safety risks have been neatly tagged in the code.
If you took a program written in Zig, Go, C++, or C, you would have no idea which parts of the code were potentially unsafe. In those languages, the entire program is one big unsafe{} block.
Rust isolates unsafe code. Having them explicitly tagged means they're isolated and can be eradicated over time, if need be. Though in many cases, unsafe blocks are quite safe.
Yes - I think the proof of the pudding will be whether they put in the effort to eliminate these unsafe blocks. The conversion to Rust is the starting point that makes this possible, but it's definitely not "done" at this point.
Yes but through iterative ratcheting, some portion of that unsafe can likely be migrated to idiomatic code without unsafe. And the other 96% of the code now has more mechanical guarantees than it did before.
Static linting in Rust via clippy also makes it pretty straightforward to begin enforcing things like "unsafe blocks need to have safety doc comments" as a CI warning or failure, and there are community tools that focus on this topic too.
I can't stand the practice of "LLM porting" personally but if you're going to do a mechanical rewrite from something else into Rust, this (permit unsafe and unidiomatic but 1:1 translation at first) is a fairly reasonable strategy imo.
Possible, yes. But it's not like it's terribly difficult to verify correct usage of "unsafe" that amounts to a basic function call to a C library. Trivial uses of unsafe are pretty innocuous.
You have to put similar amount of resources when writing in Rust as well. With the difference that it’s more front loaded. Personally I’m a fan of Rust’s approach but the price for having bug free code has to be paid, regardless, one way or the other.
I’ve not seen any languages that does not require meticulous care to avoid runtime bugs. Type checking and lifetime ownership eliminate some, but not all of them.
> Type checking and lifetime ownership eliminate some, but not all of them.
They actually remove certain classes completely. E.g. lifetime ownership in Rust removes all bugs related to the reason why it is in the code syntax (a.k.a. lifetime markers remove use-after-free completely in Rust.)
That "I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred" made me do a spit take, because a majority of what I had just read was absolutely a personally targeted criticism of Jarred.
Whether that's "okay" is a totally separate issue. I have no idea what the history here is, or whether this is warranted. But that was absolutely a personal criticism!
I don’t even understand why write this? So much code gets rewritten. Typescript 7 has just been rewritten from TS to Go, yielding much better performance. They chose Go over Rust because TS codebase looks more like the Go one.
No one is throwing chicken tendies over it. Countless other examples. Big deal
I don’t use Zig and I never will - the gushing fan base that has top-loaded fuzzy feels over technical superiority has made that certain, but this is not even a language to language debate. This is just sour grapes. But it sounds like even the people here now don’t want to use Zig due to how it makes them feel. Oh well.
A better title would be 'My emotions on the Bun Rust Rewrite', since the article feels like an emotional reaction rather than a thoughtful analysis of the situation. Give it some time..
I'm rooting for Zig either way, even though I have nothing against Rust and I don't directly use bun.
I was wrong to be upset this whole time that the rewrite would hurt Zig. This is one of those rare occasions when I’m glad I was wrong. Interesting insights.
I don't think Bun actually matters much, even for web development. For sure there is a lot of enthusiasm, but all the production systems I know continue to use Node.js and are not moving to Bun any time soon. In the "real world" not that many people care about it.
I find this sad, as I use Bun as a Node.js replacement that works really well. I wanted improved builds times and run speed. Both things bun provided. It reduced ram usage and worked with the node ecosystem well.
So for some workflows it looked like a flat improvement on all parts.
well, for me personally, "the" Zig project is not Bun but Ghostty, and it always has been.
yeah, Mitchell is very pro-AI, but he is thoughtful, and he sometimes highlights the difference between Zig's and Ghostty's approaches to LLMs (outright ban vs taming)
Yeah and Andrew Kelley is anti AI for his project because it’s counter to the projects learning goals. I think it’s perfectly fine for a project to determine if AI contributions are accepted. Maybe that means change is slower in that project, maybe that means things are more deliberate too.
OSS projects can survive not being on GitHub, Python was something like 20 years was not on gh. If the service has severe outages and there are alternatives why wouldn’t you move? Most people aren’t contributing to the runtime anyways, they are just using the language.
I do not think the original blog post demands a reply. Zig people have already written about this. I found the original blog post quite complimentary of Zig and the community.
It is challenging for me to imagine how one would think an article like this is net beneficial for the community rather than reacting with grace.
Jared has behaved appallingly in recent months. Comments about locking out humans from open source code contributions and the gaslighting at the start of the migration are top of mind.
"If this was a tweet people would be fine with it"
Actually, some folks do care about how the leader and public face of a project conduct themselves regardless of venue. If a different public figure ie some CEO wrote something reprehensible about some particular ethnic group, is it more excusable or forgivable if they did it on their personal social media account rather than the company blog? Same basic thing.
Public writing in a personal space is still public writing. Being held accountable for publicly stated views is an inherent part of sharing them in public, no?
When I read about the bun rewrite I thought no sh*t, those are the exactly the types of bugs I would expect when doing a line by line rewrite of a program in a GC language to memory managed.
I was unimpressed with the engineering from the blog, and I'm not surprised to read andrew say they claimed no fuzz testing. I know someone who interviewed at bun when it was less than 10 people (around 5 he said). Allegedly jared lowballed the fk out of my friend, claimed they had no money because they're a startup, then proceeded to offer <1% equity
I think I'm missing something; neither zig nor rust are GC languages. Did bun originally start off in javascript or something, and the rewrite you're referring to is from JS to zig?
First line of the original article (not including the disclosure)
> Bun started as a line-for-line port of esbuild's JavaScript & TypeScript transpiler from Go to Zig
Then proceeded to talk about use after free bugs, leaks, and other things that wouldn't exist in GC written programs. Ironically, my friend jared lowballed is an expert in C, runtimes and threading
Why are we so eager to dismiss the very personal experiences of Andrew - someone who envisioned and developed Zig from the ground up? It is entirely within the realm of possibility that what he describes here did transpire. He had bad experiences with one of the more popular projects within the ecosystem - something that he hoped would become successful but the incentives were clearly misaligned.
When in doubt - look at the incentives. And the incentives here are fairly obvious. On one hand we have an open source project that is focused on quality and craftsmanship, and on the other hand we have the world's biggest AI company.
I am not anti-AI. But things like taste and quality matter. And I trust the creator of Zig more than the creator of Bun when it comes to said taste.
> But things like taste and quality matter. And I trust the creator of Zig more than the creator of Bun when it comes to said taste.
Having read both articles I'm in the opposite corner. I found Andrew's personal ad-hominem filled emotional post distasteful and Jarred's purely technical and filled with praise of Zig well written and in good taste.
But it wasn't full of praise for Zig. It specifically pointed out that his project written in zig was full of memory safety bugs, and said that there was no way to get around that if the project stayed with zig. It's ludicrous!
Dedicating most of the article to a personal attack and then finishing by saying that you don't have anything against the person is a bit of an odd sequence.
>There's a dichotomy being presented here where you have to either choose a "style guide" or a programming language feature in order to avoid bugs. The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it. You're not giving TigerBeetle nearly enough credit.
In a post-Rust world I really don't like the rebuttal for eschewing memory-safety is always "you aren't engineering hard enough". The guys at TigerBeetle are "real engineers" and don't need memory safety. If I'm spending most of my time manually chasing memory errors, I didn't "real engineer" hard enough.
Chasing esoteric memory bugs are the worst kinds of bugs to pin down. They are always non-obvious (because if they were they would be fixed) and almost always non-deterministic. I'm just can't escape feeling like new memory unsafe languages are just hobby projects.
I've chased down plenty of esoteric bugs in my career and memory safety ones were usually the easiest. There are tools like valgrind, address sanitizer, etc. that help with those, or, like you said, there are memory safe languages (any interpreted language, for example). I've dealt with even harder to find bugs from things such as:
- misunderstood specifications
- missing else clause to an if statement
- wires with the insulation rubbed off in an embedded system with a mechanical design flaw
- accidental endless loops starving all other tasks
- priority inversion
- string encoding problems
- byte order problems
- etc., etc.
From everything I've read now about this bun project, I won't be surprised to hear that it continues to have lots of bugs even after this rewrite to rust
Thank you Andrew for sharing your side of the story. We can see that the relationship with Bun and Jarred was far from easy. You say it with your own words and even if it sounds bitter I like it much more than some bland AI assisted content.
> There's a dichotomy being presented here where you have to either choose a "style guide" or a programming language feature in order to avoid bugs. The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it. You're not giving TigerBeetle nearly enough credit. Quite simply they put in the time to find and eliminate the bugs, they make an effort to maintain a healthy relationship with ZSF, and Bun did not do that.
This is not a compelling sales pitch. The point of using a memory-safe language is not needing to put in extra work to avoid use-after-free or out-of-bounds memory access.
It would have been more reassuring to hear that Zig has its own memory safety story that should also be able to prevent most of the same bugs. But instead the answer is "work harder for the same result."
When Zig was first created, Rust looked genuinely harder to use because the borrow checker is so demanding and its errors sometimes so hard to reason about and fix. It made Zig look much simpler and easier by comparison. But now, LLMs are very good at writing Rust. I've been writing Rust using LLMs for weeks and haven't thought about the borrow checker once.
AI made Rust tractable without heroic effort, and in doing so eroded one of Zig's major advantages.
The point about compile times is taken though. Rust is definitely slow to compile, easier to believe it's slower than Zig.
Andrew could have been more tactful in his blog post (though as I've grown older I often find less tact to be more effective), but it really sounds like accommodating Bun was a net negative for Zig.
When Jarred joined the Zig community about 5 years ago, I described him as someone who had strong "beginner energy".
I wouldn't call it beginner energy, though I understand it might seem like that. Rather, it's an approach to development and no amount of time changes it.
Bun's bundler claimed the bottom place in my recent analysis of how JavaScript tools handle generating inline script tags[1], because despite making lofty promises about being able to bundle applications into standalone HTML files, it produced a baffling combination of spurious syntax errors and miscompilations when presented with tricky code.
I'm pretty sure the version I tested was the Zig one (have they made a stable release of the Rust rewrite yet?). So I can definitely see how Bun's move-fast-and-break-things philosophy would have been a poor fit for the Zig community, even prior to the Rust rewrite.
Am I right in thinking the Bun rewrite hasn't actually been released yet? There was a big kerfuffle when it was merged to master and people seemed to be behaving like that meant it was all done and dusted (as does this article), but it looks like the last release is still 1.3.14 from April so presumably general users are still on the Zig version? Is there a timeline for release?
i think the blog post was very honest and direct and i could not agree more with andrew, now i’m not a zig user and i don’t find the language itself pleasing but it’s just a matter of taste,
i admire a few things in zig community, the focus on human relationship with learning and discovery and the focus on performance and building a meaningful relationship with members of community, I wish all the best to the zig and its community, although i have heard a few years ago that andrew was making apologies for not having enough diversity (race and skin colour wise) which i guess was a very dumb statement, but hey we all make dumb statements!
I really admire his stance on AI and agentic code contribution and the joy that they find in crafting good tools.
Andrew Kelly be like
"You give major beginner energy, you're a bad manager, your code is trash and I was soo happy when you left"
and then ends with
"this is not personal criticism BTW"
Yikes, the majority of this blog post is saying basically "skill issue" and "Jarred bad engineer", but I think that hurts Zig far more than Andrew realises.
If Bun, a disaster of engineering apparently, simply just switches to Rust and all of their issues magically disappear... then the Rust Vs Zig war is over before it started right?
> "There's a dichotomy being presented here where you have to either choose a "style guide" or a programming language feature in order to avoid bugs. The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it. You're not giving TigerBeetle nearly enough credit. Quite simply they put in the time to find and eliminate the bugs, they make an effort to maintain a healthy relationship with ZSF, and Bun did not do that."
The reference to TigerBeetle is important, and a bit under-explained for the point he's trying to make. They have consistently attributed things like design and deterministic simulation testing to their success and reliability, which has nothing to do with Zig as a language. Some things might be _easier_ in Zig, such as static memory allocation, but ultimately, a holistic approach brings success, not one individual tool used "right".
> The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.
Interesting I wonder if its something Jarred did locally or something else that was just not widely done by the whole team? I dont like to make bad assumptions about devs or dev teams without first asking. I owe credit to HN for one of the guidelines which states something like do not assume intentional malice in comments, I feel like we assume the worst in general about other devs, but people are imperfect and make mistakes.
That said as others noted this post could have been written a bit differently while still pointing out genuine issues. The ad hominem attacks are a bit unnecessary and add nothing of value to what could have been a better response.
As an outside observer with no horse in this race I think this post its more about the feelings of Andrew than pure technical content. He must surely feel frustated about Bun's migration to Rust and what it means for Zig, but it reads as sour grapes.
Compare the tone of this post to the one from Jarred about the Rust migration from yesterday, that one reads like a sensible technical document (no matter what you feel about the AI assisted migration).
This one reeks of hurt ego to me. Hell hath no fury like a language creator scorned.
Just 12 hours [1] before I wrote on HN how I hope Zig won't do a hostile reply to Jarred's blog post.
I was half expecting it to be from Loris Cro, being VP of community for Zig. But was really hoping Andrew would write one himself, hopefully being more diplomatic.
I was wrong.
Even if everything that was listed in the blog was true, it could have been either not mentioned, or in all cases put it in much better way. And that is why copywriter are worth something.
Disagreeing on AI, How to run its business, low salary for Zig's job hurts the Zig foundation, Code quality, meaning on Fuzzing etc. Instead a lot of this now reads to me as direct attack. It could have been written as a heavy disagreement in a much more professional manner.
And no, professional doesn't mean cooperate speak.
Considering the Internet was on Zig's side when Bun switch to Rust was brewing.
I’m not sure why this post even exists? It feels completely unnecessary. Don’t get me wrong, I like drama as much as the next guy, but it didn’t have to be public imo
I like zig a lot, I share its core philosophy, and I generally agree with Andrew's views. I found this article interesting, and I think it is understandable in all of this to be a bit bitter towards Bun and Jarred - in some sense, it had turned into a big "If you don't use Rust in 2026 you are stupid" which directly hurts the Zig project.
Personally, I prefer zig over most other languages. I find "memory-safety" is bought at the price of code that is not straightforward to reason about and requiring a steep learning curve. The reader's working memory is filled up quickly with language constructs and crutches rather than with the actual logic of the code at hand. I have used C++ for a large part of my professional career and eventually got so annoyed by always having to cross-reference multiple files to check which behavior might be used by which constructor and things like that. I have written a big and critical system in pure C once, just to try, and while I would not do it again, diligence and testing resulted in virtually zero runtime failures across its lifespan - while it was always possible to quickly reason about all the logic that tied low-level hardware access and near-realtime requirements together in a way much more visible than hidden behind layers of "safe" abstraction. Zig is, for me, the sweet spot: It solves the terrible issues that plain C has, and adds a lot of convenience on top that does not obscure the logic, while encouraging but not enforcing safe patterns.
Why do I feel like reading the post of someone jealous or with low self esteem issues? Zig was not a good fit so why does it have to be a personal attack on the Bun maintainer over his life choices and his management decisions? Whatever beef you have with someone it should not be « zig is for elite and you are just an evil corporate maintainer because you are holding it wrong »
Zig is getting that Elm, etc vibe. Genius/visionary BFDL who's also personally incapable of leading the project towards healthy long-term viability.
Say what you will about Matz or José Valim, I don't think they'd ever write a "and don't let the door hit you on the way out" screed full of personal attacks ("stinky manager", "writing slop", "a total shit show") against a person who led a very prominent project and financially supported the language.
Other people (not meaning this about you) very frequently seem to throw around the BFDL acronym uncritically without remembering or caring that Benevolent is the first word in there.
This blog post is mostly made up of pettiness and is not an isolated incident - he is often pretty "spicy" or downright hostile in comments sections when making an appearance.
So is this guy going to dress down any project that decides to move off of Zig? If Mitchell Hashimoto decides to move Ghostty off of Zig to C or Rust will we get a scathing blog post about that too?
While I understand ZSF's bittersweet relationship with Oven and agree to several points (especially preparedness), this writing is badly structured and that shows something. Hope to see him turning around.
> The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it.
I was on a platform team and I had a constant backlog of bugs (introduced by others) that I was working on and the two most impactful things for preventing bugs were Typescript and Cypress (playwright-like testing before playwright).
I've dealt with many shitty code bases and the only way that worked for removing bugs was automation. It didn't matter how many bodies you threw at the problem.
> Then why are you saying you have so many annoying bugs in the Zig code? What happened to the test suite being sufficient to catch everything?
You can't use tests for trying to catch use after frees and other memory bugs for the same reason you can't use unit tests as a replacement for type checking, the combinatorial explosion of possible inputs into functions makes unit testing types across an entire project impossible.
Anyway, Jared donated $60k a year to this project and tried to resolve this in the most diplomatic way possible and still got personally attacked. The lesson from this article is don't donate to the Zig project because if you migrate away from it they will try to ruin your reputation.
> I've dealt with many shitty code bases and the only way that worked for removing bugs was automation. It didn't matter how many bodies you threw at the problem.
Can't say my experience matches yours. Types do seem to structurally reduce some varieties of bugs, but ultimately the only reliable way I've seen to close the gap is hire disciplined people who care about, and thoughtfully consider, what they build.
E.g., the shittiest codebases I've ever seen were TypeScript. It in no way prevents you writing bugs or slop
> but ultimately the only reliable way I've seen to close the gap is hire disciplined people who care about, and thoughtfully consider, what they build.
You were able to turn around a codebase that was growing its bug count exponentially by changing an entire company's hiring practices?
I really don't believe in the "just don't be stupid" or "don't hire stupid people" approach to things. If it works, it only works at a small scale and once things become urgent enough, things fall apart.
Or the systemd guys, or the OpenBSD guys, or the GNU guys, or the Open Source guys, or the Oracle guy, or the Apple guy, or the Microsoft guys, or just about any leader of a big project/corporation
I'm glad LLM coding exists for people who want to move at an insane superhuman speed (perhaps they're trying to achieve escape velocity and launch into the stars or something) so that they don't grind down their fellow humans.
You can either do local optimization - a single individual moving as fast and as hard as humanly possible, or global optimization - a team working together and amplifying each other's efforts to produce something that is greater than the sum of its parts.
The project needs an adult in the room - preferably someone less on the spectrum - who approves this content before it goes out. This reads as an incredibly butthurt, petulant rant, authored by someone deeply hurt that users are putting all the blocks into the square hole. Andrew would have been served better by a Linus-style curt takedown, rather than this drivel.
Are you implying that this reads as all those bad things because Andrew is supposedly autistic? And that if he were to not supposedly have autism, this post wouldn't have read as all those bad things? This reads as an incredibly ableist post authored by someone who thinks autism is an insurmountably negative thing and that someone with "sufficient" autism shouldn't run a project. As if autism is a percentage where once you get past 33% you immediately become incompetent. Be better.
Did everyone forget how when the news first broke, Jared told everyone to calm down; it wasn’t a big deal? That was very deceitful to me.
Jared seems like the typical SV tech bro who deserves this type of personal disrespect, but of course 90% of people on this site would love to him and wouldn’t understand.
The blog post looks a bit distasteful if I'm honest. I was expecting a technical writeup explaining why it was/wasn't a good fit for zig.
> He gets to live out his productivity fantasy fever dream, he's probably already super wealthy. He has minor tech celebrity status.
Looks like a backhanded personal comment? This didn't need to be in the article.
> It's almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article.
> The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.
Smells like a lot of bias coming in. The fuzzing part was not a fabrication.
> sufficient to catch bugs in 1 million lines of unreviewed slop?
I don't understand how even today software engineers are calling LLM written code slop? It's objectively much better than what most of the engineers write, and it's not stopping to get better.
If you still believe this, try out any frontier model on any work that you are currently doing, that should change your mind. There still are like 1% of cases where LLMs are not that good, but even there almost all of the time the issue is in the engineer's steering, not the LLM.
> There's a dichotomy being presented here where you have to either choose a "style guide" or a programming language feature in order to avoid bugs.
He says this, but doesn't give the steps to solve this?
> we all felt at ZSF that Bun was a net liability.
> "It Tastes Like It's Not My Problem Anymore"
> influx of tasteless AI enthusists into Zig communities
This may be the stance that encouraged Bun to leave.
When you said that “His code was slop well before LLMs” got a good cackle out of me.
The fact is, most people don’t have taste and haven’t had taste, LLMs just amplify what was already there. Good taste is good taste, slop is slop, and shit is shit.
It feels like the first half of blog post is less of "thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite" and more "I don't like Jarred, he's a bad programmer and manager".
Maybe I'm wrong, but it strongly feels this way. I'm not saying that Andrew is right or wrong, it's just that you could throw out most of the first half of the post and not lose anything actually on topic.
> But having graduated from the Thiel Fellowship school of thought rather than university, he was essentially groomed from a young age into uncritically embracing the Silicon Valley mindset, and he took venture capital.
> Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective.
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
Same. After following the drama on HN and Twitter it's pretty clear Jarred has been intentionally doing something that's hurting Zig/Bun community. What I've seen check out with those statements in the post
I mean I wouldn’t want to work for Andrew Kelley either. Doesn’t mean I don’t see utility in zig. Taking swings at a pretty toxic culture (silicon valley) while refreshing also paints a target on your back. This isn’t unhinged shit though so it hasn’t dissuaded me from learning Zig
I sincerely don't understand why speaking from a personal perspective to another person is considered a bad thing.
Andrew is Zig's leader, and he is defending himself and his project from what he perceived as damaging. Jarred did the same.
We are human beings. We have interpersonal relationships. We enter relationships, and we also leave them.
Also, calling this "drama" in a pejorative way is a simplistic, head in the sand attitude. Again, we are human beings, and our interactions are going to involve drama.
The tone used in his personal blog was personal. I would have expected a more professional one if the post had been on sites related to the ZSF. Both would have had the same goal: to express the feeling of a partnership that ended on bad terms.
Ex-Bun employee for transparency. I have skin in the game.
I respect andrewrk and Jarred in different ways. My understanding are that neither are media trained. Very patronizing post from andrewrk and shows his hostility towards Jarred. I mostly agree with the core meat and potatoes of his post, but the hostile tone, the snarky VC-related remarks, the fact that *most* of his comments felt like a defensive remark.
Yes -- bun has problems. Yes -- bun moves very quickly. Yes -- the 1.4 post seems quite heavily copy-written. Yes -- Jarred doesn't have a syseng background.
But god fucking damn Andrew, you have some problems too -- you have your head up your ass. Every Zig feature that people would love to have, which you personally disagree with will NEVER enter Zig. Why do I still need anonymous structures for lambdas? Sure, no closures I get, but no lambdas? My friends at Tesla tried Zig and then churned to Rust too, for the very same questionable leadership model. Zig will never be a general purpose language because the people -- who have many different generic and general purposes for a language -- simply don't get what they want. Zig is an andrewrk-purpose language at best. Is this leadership for the future of Zig?
I don't want to slander andrewrk. With the brief hiss I've provided, I think he does a more-or-less great job with Zig. It's a really small team, and they're really productive too. The ZSF is a really nice set of people too, from my brief fly-on-the wall moments with meetings with them. They care about Zig and they work really darn hard for it. I've also learned a huge amount from andrewrk, and I respect that he's an off-the-cuff guy. Surprisingly, I am too. Chances are, in his shoes, I'd probably get equally rage-baited to write a similar post.
But reflecting upon this, this is just not productive. These kind of public outlashes are not healthy for the language, don't cause good publicity, and could have been a useful reflection point for the ZSF -- not in terms of money, but in terms of what they want to do with the language. Instead of being a strawman at Jarred, it could have been:
- Bun's not the greatest code quality. (And it really isn't -- I was very stressed by this at work)
- Zig doesn't aim to give you tools to manage complexity. We expect the developer to adhere to high code quality. (And this is also very true, coming from C++ -- I was also very stressed by this reality.)
- The AI-generated rewrite is not a good idea for reasons XYZ (and I personally think this is true).
- We are grateful for Bun being part of the ecosystem, but agree it doesn't adhere to our ethos, nor design philosophy, so it makes sense.
The discussion in the Rust circles (which I am a part of too) is completely different and so much more nuanced -- folks are talking about the code, how many unsafes there are, some of the very valid concerns, but the tone is significantly less enraged.
This is a perfectly legal, polite way to leech on top of the media attention (I mean we are all doing it), maybe throw in some spicy bits with references to some GH issues to stir Twitter up but remain polite and respectful. This was just rude for no good reason, esp. because Jarred CLEARLY was only very respectful towards ZSF.
Personally, I won't run Bun in prod, but I no longer write any Zig either. Good old node for me, and good old C, Rust and C++ too.
Why must every language have every feature, mass applicability, and be intended to be the language-to-end-all-languages? Growth or marketshare is not the only valuable aim.
If you want mutable data structures, I wouldn't point you to Haskell.
I think people are overfocusing on the wrong thing.
Bun is slop. Let's not pretend it is not. It went from 600k lines of zig to almost a million of rust, for a wrapper around a js engine. It might be useful slop, but it is still slop.
It's understandable to have mixed feelings about bun as the creator of the language.
You spend 10 years of your time making a language, and one of the most prominent projects that uses it does it in a nasty and sloppy way. You try to help, but your advice gets ignored.
You make a whole language about improving software quality, only to be associated with a project that doesn't care about it.
For once I do appreciate that somebody is willing to have the guts to say what they think. The bun rust rewrite article said no words about the tradeoffs of moving to Rust (compilation times?), and I agree with the false dichotomy presented. How do we know that most bun bugs were not created because of slop / AI usage / stubbornness?
I desperately hope that the Andrew Kelley style of software engineering will survive all of this; that users will continue to value quality and not be content with slop. This, of course, presumes that products built fully by agents will produce sub-par quality in the future. If they will be able to manage to glue all of this slop together without the project collapsing in on itself, none of this will matter. I just hope that this isn't the future of the industry.
I recall an instance where he mocked the project as "Microslop" on his blog and then quietly edited the post later.
That aside, the earlier rewrite from TypeScript to Go involved efforts to minimize regressions as much as possible—such as announcements to users and the community, and a phased, one-on-one migration.
This project, however, is a different story. It becomes from a buggy product to an entire slop product.
> Microslop Windows provides a large ABI surface area for doing things in the kernel. However, not all ABIs are created equally. As Casey Muratori points out in his lecture, The Only Unbreakable Law, the organizational structure of software development teams has a direct impact on the structure of the software they produce.
> We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks.
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
Ufff, the creator of zig saying that the biggest zig project is slop was definitly not on my bingo card.
Its sad to see that on of the biggest projects was more or less badly written zig code. On that note, I wonder which big project have good zig code?
That is a 100% on point analysis, there was a lot of hype around Bun since the beginning when it was an invite only project. Arguably that same interest is what got Jarred VC funding in the first place.
Note that usage and public interest are not the same quantity, people also care about the potential of a project.
Nice writing by Andrew IMO, please don’t be discouraged by people criticizing the writing style, it is firmly on the lighter side of what I would expect. It even feels a bit passive aggressive to me so it would be better have a more direct and harsh writing style maybe?
As a side note, never trust someone saying they use fuzz testing just because they say so. Odds are they don’t even understand what fuzz testing is.
And it was glaringly obvious they don’t know how to program in this context from their complaints around memory safety. The issue should never that the code randomly segfaults, it should only be it maybe exploitable in an adversarial scenario.
For all comments that will write something like “I can’t believe how rude this is”:
No one really care about this, there are real problems in life, please get a grip, you are just being annoying
The video he links to at the end is such a strong message, somehow able to celebrate the promise of AI while not afraid to point out whats complicated, or even fraught there. AI is, truly, a reflection of ourselves, our own hangups, prejudice, desire. Its both what draws us to it, but also inspires us to be critical. Thanks for the prescient reminder there OP.
Calling someone "stinky manager" is not ad hominem. It's a way of saying that he's managerial skills are very poor. Does it relate to the argument? Very much so. Changing a bread factory into a slop factory makes Jarred a stinky manager and even a "sloppy" one
Never heard of Bun or Jarred before today
I enjoyed his blog post about the migration to rust, it is an impressive feat if real ! I didnt see anything bad about Zig in the post, on the contrary it shows respect and that big projects can be done in Zig
Next, I read Andrew's post, and the thing I see is: Jarred looks like an achiever, Andrew more like a butthurt childish whiner
I also can see why Jarred made the migration, it is not only technical, and it was a great call IMHO
1.It felt uncomfortable that Bun was presented as a representative example of Zig. From the internal Zig perspective, it looked more like a bad example of how to use Zig.
2.It felt uncomfortable that they spoke as if Rust prevents things that could actually be handled by Zig's style guide.
3.I(OP,andrewkelly) don't think badly of Jarred as a person, but after signing a contract with VC, the management side has been poor.
4.The Bun documentation looked like marketing.
5.Bad contributions driven by AI came through indirect promotion of Bun, which attracted interest from people after it was acquired by Antropic.
I understand that it's burdensome to see Bun as Zig's representative success story, and I get the wish not to see Rust rewrites through a lens of language superiority. But on the flip side, I'm not sure I would have ever learned about Zig if not for Bun.
While the criticism is valid, I also understand Bun's position. After all, Antropic's acquisition of Bun was ultimately about showing that even a 'new language' can be used effectively with AI, and that's precisely where the friction arose.
I think the refusal to accept AI from a purely human programmer perspective is a matter of personal values, and I find the Zig team admirable on a human level. (Though I'm an active proponent of AI, so my view differs.)
Both sides have valid points, but sometimes I wish someone would turn the emotional and political dynamics of open source into a novel. I think it would be fascinating
> 2.It felt uncomfortable that they spoke as if Rust prevents things that could actually be handled by Zig's style guide.
"Handled by Zig's style guide" ends up as "Don't make mistakes" which is entirely useless advice. C++ spent years trying to make out that this constitutes useful guidance before gradually accepting that people aren't in fact going to stop making mistakes, you need to provide a better language and tools.
I agree with some points as well.
In fact, the OP argues that sufficient engineering attention can solve the problem, but I think that's only theoretical in reality, it's difficult.
It's like C programmers claiming that undefined behavior is manageable.
Not accepting a PR because it was purely written by AI is like saying PRs will only be accepted if the developer used a standing desk for more than 75% of the time during the code's creation. In the end, as long as the code is not shit, who cares how the sausage was made!
I find it hard to believe you actually think those two things are similar or equivalent. I've heard many bad analogies in my life but this is so funny that it makes me think you're being sarcastic.
I for one appreciate a public figure with a wildly opposed mindset to the Silicon Valley/VC-Funded/Ultrascaling/whatever crowd.
The pushback is warranted and on point, especially the technical points. It has taken a suspicious amount of time to produce the fabled blog post which I don't think states almost any new information beyond what Jarred has already shared on twitter. The one (and very interesting) exception is the theoretical price of the rewrite via the API pricing.
Disclaimer: I'm bullish on Rust. And I think LLMs are overhyped, and kind of overhated.
Honestly, I think it would have been better if he had done the smart thing and ignored the noise around Bun's Zig -> Rust, and focused on code.
If he was willing to ride the coattails of Zig being hyped by Bun, then he should have taken the hit when Zig and Bun parted ways.
Hell, if he is that happy that they are leaving, he shouldn't have written that he is happy. Just smile and wave...
So now Jarred wrote a very matter-of-fact post about migrating Bun to Rust, and Andrew Kelley wrote a ranty blog about Jarred sucking at Zig, and being glad he's gone.
>We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. Abuse of assertions. Most of all, recklessly speeding past feature after feature with very little time taken for reflection and elimination of bugs and technical debt.
I'd like to know what the poor code quality in Bun looks like. Does anybody have concrete examples?
I notice something more interesting. This post shows Andrew to not only personally criticise Ben but also clearly shows an ideological stance against AI. I can see it from multiple angles - refusing AI PR's, refusing Anthropic's donation and multiple other things.
Either this ideology helps Zig position itself as a hand crafted language. Or this ideology is self defeating.
While I agree that the Zig code in Bun could be better, and that the Silicon Valley pressure to move fast and break things prevented a lot of suggested improvements, this feels like the same argument as people who write C or C++ where people think they wouldn’t make mistakes.
For example this section
> We've been trying to warn you about your comptime abuse for years.
You could replace comptime with templates in C++ and it would be the same story. People will abuse features you put in the language. Is C++ a good language that people are just using wrong? According to Bjarne Stroustrup yes, and the C++ core guidelines fixes those issues, but a lot of people seem to disagree. Don't believe me here is an interview where he talks about memory safety in C++? ^1
> Ryan: One thing that I think C++ is uh infamous for is kind of like memory safety issues or kind of foot guns that exist there.
> Bjarne: I'm so tired of that. Um I haven't had those problems for years. Um, and somebody did a a study of the obvious problems with buffer overflows and um people hacking in using that kind of stuff and uh almost all of the uh these cases when people writing C style code or in C and uh Herb Server has a a talk with with actual numbers and they they are quite significant. It's it's sort of that kind of problems more than 90% are for people that don't write modern C++. They they use raw pointers to pass things around without um the number of elements. No fat pointers, no spans. um you you have them in C++. You can use them. You can use uh vectors. We have hardened libraries. Everybody has hardened libraries that that does the runtime checking. Uh Apple has it. Google has it. Microsoft has it. It's just not standard till now. C++ 26 has a hardened option that are standard. uh and the work I'm doing on profiles will give you a way of guaranteeing that you don't do the stupid things. Um so anyway, uh fundamentally theoretically the problem was solved many years ago and people just do what they've always done and get the problems they've always had. And uh that makes me sad and uh it's one of the things that makes me work on uh coding guidelines and on enforced profiles and on education. I mean education is one way to solve the problem. Is there a way to get the compiler to just prevent people from doing all those risky things? And is that enabled by default in modern C++ today? No, but it should be. I'm proposing that for C++ 29. Uh the simpler versions of that should have been in in in uh C++ 26, but there are still a lot of people even in the C++ standards committee that are very devoted to uh their old code and their old ways of doing things. Um there's people who says you should only standardize what is common in industry. But when the bugs are common in industry, you should do something else.
Is this going to be Zig's answers to real issues that people have in the real world? I'd argue that's not good enough for a modern systems programming language.
> We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. Abuse of assertions. Most of all, recklessly speeding past feature after feature with very little time taken for reflection and elimination of bugs and technical debt.
The vast majority of software is written by businesses, who have to cater to the lowest common denominator in their code base, including slop programmers, pre or post llm. They are not incentivized to go slower. We will never see a mass adoption of Tiger Style programming (though I would be happy to be proven wrong). That is the reality of what we need programming languages to help with in 2026. I've never met a professional programmer that has not seen or said the same thing about a code base that they've worked on.
New programming languages need to contend with that reality if they want to be adopted en masse. If not they are doomed to not be adopted (which is okay I've created many programming languages that are just for me). But if a programming language in never adopted then the supposed benefits or improvements of the language never trickle down to us the users of the software, so they just remain interesting ideas (which again is okay).
> This attention could have been harnessed in a few different ways. For example, he could have easily achieved a solid living via crowdfunding, even for San Francisco standards.
Andrew kelley runs a tight ship, and his foundation does not need a lot of money to keep going, but he has talked about how working on all the organizational transparency is not his favorite part of the project, and I can see why a lot of young programmers wouldn’t want to go that way.
Now let me be clear I actually like Zig, and have promoted it on Hacker News before, and written some code myself. I actual uses Zigcc in one of my projects because it makes my life easier. I genuinely love the tooling of Zig, and I feel like the language respects my time. I want the language to succeed
I also think that Andrew Kelley is a principled man with good engineering sense, and has turned down opportunities that would have made him a lot more money, were he to violate his own principles. That is admirable, and he has demonstrated it on so many occasions that it is currently not a question to me. What I would like to see, and what Andrew has said Zig focuses is how Zig can improve program correctness even more, without requiring me, or my coworkers to be a 10x programmer
I agree with some of your points, but I think the Safe C++ project will be difficult because it would require breaking backward compatibility with existing projects. Honestly, I also don't agree with the claim that 'if you manage it well, data races and memory safety errors won't happen.' However, C++ already has so many projects built on it that breaking backward compatibility would cause serious problems. I think it might be better to just switch to a different language altogether.
This is quite an interesting read from Andrew's perspective. But one line tells me everything I needed to know.
> The blog post is expertly written. It's almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article.
Even Andrew knew that this was going to be Anthropic's marketing opportunity for AI to rewrite Bun from Zig into Rust. This post from Jarred says it all. [0] If you have access to hundreds of billions worth of resources (infinite tokens and compute), they don't care what others think and some relationships are just cheap to discard.
Like I said before in [1] and [2], Bun (now Anthropic) does not care about you. They did this to market the capabilities of their AI models and this rewrite was an example of that in broad daylight. Even if Zig allowed AI generated contributions, this move was going to happen anyway.
I cannot believe that many commenters in [0] at the time did not see that this rewrite was eventually going to happen.
I have learned so much reading Andrew’s code and as I said in the original post: Bun would never have happened without Zig.
> The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.
Fuzzilli integration: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/24826
Merged PRs fixing issues Fuzzilli found in Bun’s Zig code:
- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/28926
- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/28934
- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29255
- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29210
- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29199
Searching “Fuzzilli” shows more PRs: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aoven-sh%2Fbun+is%3Apr+Fuz...
You're a champ, man
Andrew means the zig build test --fuzz command probably the built in zig fuzzer, that's the tool that is in his scope.
Not sure I follow. Is "fuzzing their Zig code" somehow related to adding a Fuzzilli integration to Bun?
Yes, "their" refers to Bun's code, not the Zig compiler's code. Fuzzili is a fuzzing engine for JavaScript, so integrating it into Bun means that Fuzzili is fuzzing Bun.[0]
From the Bun post[1]
> We fuzz Bun's runtime APIs 24/7 using Fuzzilli, the JavaScript engine fuzzer used by V8 & JavaScriptCore
From Andrew Kelley's post today[2]:
> The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.
Sumner says that the Bun team has been fuzzing Bun's Zig code. Kelley says that this is a fabrication. Sumner showed proof that the Bun team has been fuzzing Bun's Zig code.
It looks like Kelley is incorrect and made an unfounded claim. The generous interpretation is that at the time Kelley and Sumner had a more collaborative relationship, Sumner was not fuzzing Bun's Zig code, but I'd expect Kelley to check if anything had changed since then before publicly accusing Sumner of lying in this week's Bun blog post.
[0] https://github.com/googleprojectzero/fuzzilli
[1] https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust
[2] https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...
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Your links show you used a fuzzer, but that doesn't address the other half of Andrew's statement. Is Andrew misreporting/misremembering your conversations?
EDIT: It's really telling that asking a factual clarification question is somehow downvote worthy. I probably shouldn't be surprised, but this epitomizes the reason online discussions devolve in to flame wars (even moreso than real life, though it happens more and more there as well).
The answer could be as simple as we didn't use a fuzzer until recently so both are accurate. I honestly don't know, which is why I'm asking. Yet somehow just asking is triggering to people.
Or, did the whole Bun team indeed state the otherwise to Zig?
I have no buns to pick here in this discussion really, but doesn't it strike you as slightly pointless to specifically address one particularity of Andrew's blog post while not addressing a single other thing from it, or maybe try to move one step up to about the discussion itself, or something else?
Again, I have no dog in this fight, I "worship" neither of you, I'm just curious about the whole conversation apparently degrading rather than anyone of you trying to step in a different direction.
You want to see him address being "a stinky manager", having "beginner energy", choosing to take VC as opposed to "a solid living via crowdfunding", or "already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs"?
Those are all opinions where arguing about them isn't going to be productive.
Countering the accusation of "an outright fabrication" on the other hand is worthwhile because it's a claim that can be countered.
If somebody called me a liar for something that demonstrably wasn't a lie I wouldn't let that stand, either.
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Bun donates $60,000 per year [month] and Jarred acts with graciousness and soft tones when talking to outside parties. Why do you think it's Jarred's obligation to continue after being insulted for professional dishonesty?
Isn't it Andrew's obligation to show that he was worth that much kindness to begin with?
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The blog is not worth a reply. It's just a butthurt, petulant rant full of personal attacks.
Without having any opinion on whether or not the Bun team was meaningfully fuzzing their codebase... Andrew's claim was not about whether or not they were, it was noting that the story was different between what they claimed in conversation and what they stated in this article.
This is unprofessional and embarrassing for Zig.
I know very little about Jared but his article yesterday, which I read, seemed appreciative of Zig. I now learn he's donated significant chunks of money to them.
This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product.
It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig when it really just makes them look childish. Or maybe he doesn't care, and just wants to attack Jarred?
How is it unprofessional when it is simply someone giving their honest personal opinion on an issue that involves something that is valuable to them, on their personal blog nonetheless.
Is everyone a walking and talking brand now so that they have to always filter their words, walk on eggshells, hide behind corpo-speak so as to seem 'professional'?
More honest discourse is required in today's world, not less. It seems interactions online are becoming less and less authentic.
Yes, “corpo-speak” is the language of professionalism.
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> Those people talked to each other. Everybody talked to everybody. The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.
There’s a big gap between corpo speak and “stinky manager”. That’s nowhere close to professional writing. And he’s not giving us his personal opinion, Kelley is telling us the conclusion of the “grape vine” - he’s reporting on rumors and gossip, and agreeing with it.
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> This is unprofessional and embarrassing for Zig.
It is. It's also why Anthropic and Bun moved off Zig.
Zig is effectively a one-man show, and that one man has been making increasingly erratic decisions.
It's his project so it's well within his rights, of course. But when you're a ~trillion dollar company you don't want to get hit by a supply chain risk like this.
For Anthropic, it's better to nip this in the bud rather than invest more into the Zig ecosystem, where there's a demonstrated risk of the not-so-BDFL going off the rails.
> It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig when it really just makes them look childish.
Antirez made a post equivalent to: you'd be a fool not to use AI to increase test coverage.
Zig on the other hand has embarrassingly low test coverage given its adoption and time in development.
Their stance on AI is completely childish. They could benefit massively from it, yet refuse to even consider any potential usage.
It's one thing to try to stop PR spam. It's another thing to tie your hands behind your back and not even use it internally for the lowest hanging fruit where it could have major benefits.
They could use AI to triage potential real bugs from PR spam... but instead they just let real bugs go unnoticed for longer than need be because they won't even use AI to help triage...
in what way is it chidlish to have a principled position like this? you may disagree, i def use llms. but andrew has clear reasons for why he doesnt.
Childish or no, anti-AI sentiment is ubiquitous and growing.
From a PR perspective there’s a lot to gain in the short term by picking the “anti-AI” lane. And you can always change your mind later.
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I am fine with people having principles and doing things their way. Not everything has to be a race to be the best. There are still plenty of people that appreciate traditional crafts. Anyway, if Zig+AI can be the next, greatest thing, can't someone just fork it and make it happen?
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> Zig on the other hand has embarrassingly low test coverage
And? Why would low test coverage matter. It’s not an indication of project quality nor does a high coverage mean an absence of bugs or errors.
> This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product
The article seems to be happy about the switch to Rust, that point is re-iterated multiple times in the article, and seemingly they were both awaiting Bun moving away from Zig and wishing for it.
I feel the same way as you do. Honestly, even though it was well-packaged, I did find it a bit rude. But since I don't know their personal relationship, it's not really my place to interfere.
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Agreed. This article should have stuck to the cold facts, rather than a series of personal criticisms that you wouldn’t see written out in the workplace.
Sadly there are far too many open source developers out there who are far too comfortable writing like this. It’s one reason I have stopped being active in open source. You would be fired (or at least disciplined) from any reasonable workplace if you acted like this.
you are right, to many people feel far to comfortable writing like this. but my reaction is to double down and be more active to counter this kind of expression and make it clear that this is not welcome. it worked with linus torvalds.
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No, it's embarrassing being obsessed with good tone to the point that people behaving badly should never be called out for it.
The article provides good background into how it got to this point - and it fits well with doing an opportunistic AI rewrite after being acquired by an AI provider.
It is not about good tone it's about not being hateful and rude. Why is this that hard to pick apart?
Why do devs believe being rude is somehow a sign of honesty? They are orthogonal. This post needed none of the mean-spirited attacks that it contained to make its points. It is only hurt by the attacks as seen by the focus on "tone" throughout these comments.
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The argument isn't to avoid calling out "bad" behaviour, it's that you can do so with a professional (or at least not actively childish) tone. Using phrases like "stinky manager" while taking multiple jabs at Jarred's personal and educational background (implying by not going to university he was too stupid to think critically about his path forward) paints a weirdly childish yet elitist viewpoint. The blog post reads as vindictive, akin to something along the lines of "screw you kid, glad to be rid of you, and thanks for the $120,000 btw."
I don't interact with Zig or Bun, but I certainly haven't been enticed to try Zig after this.
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It's kind of strange to not engage with any of the points made in the article. Unlike you, I don't think the post makes them look childish at all. I think it raises a lot of valid points and makes me want to use Zig more.
> It's kind of strange to not engage with any of the points made in the article. Unlike you, I don't think the post makes them look childish at all. I think it raises a lot of valid points and makes me want to use Zig more.
I know nothing about the drama here other than what's in the blog post, but these feel more like unnecessarily public personal attacks which don't really reflect well:
- a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective
- already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
- their vague "sell some cloud something" business plan was a farce
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FWIW I was really interested in Zig and now I see that its lead developer is thin-skinned and bitter and has confused minimal criticism of his project with an attack on his person.
This is such a bad look and it's also flatly self-contradictory. He spends time in his conclusion asserting he doesn't have any personal criticisms of Jarred but he's fully happy to claim, reframe and repeat everyone else's, even criticisms he evidently heard in private.
You can also see that it was incompletely rewritten from a pure, personalised and personally-directed rant: "I noticed that you…" does not belong with the rest of the text.
Whatever the merits of Claude-driven rewrites (I suspect few, long-term), the article he is responding to has little to none of the vituperative quality of his own.
I think if it needed a response, and I was this angry, I would have written this whole post as a draft, filed it away in Apple Notes, and then posted "I have, yes, seen the article on the Bun blog; you don't need to send me it anymore! I will respond to parts of it in the future as and when they are particularly relevant."
Writing the response post can be valuable as emotional release or exploration. Posting it in this sprawling, mean form was dumb.
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The points in the article aren't great. It opens up personal and stays personal. As people in this thread have pointed out, several of the falsifiable bits turn out to be false.
The big thing though is, you get to the end of it and have to ask: why did this need to be written at all?
"It's almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article."
He does get that Anthropic is Don Draper in the elevator meme here, right?
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What points? All I'm reading is just a collection of emotional ad-hominems.
Yes, perhaps Jarred is professionally dishonest, making up fake conversations about Zig. That is the most salient point in the whole article, and Jarred shows up to simply post receipts with kind words and minimal commentary.
Would you like to discuss that point as a fellow professional in the field?
Do you have bias? I'm not saying I don't have some hidden bias but I have no skin in the game. I don't use Bun or Zig or plan to.
My reflection comes after reading Jarred's post yesterday, which I found interesting, and then Andrew's today.
I just pasted this article into an LLM to understand the tone and the summary is:
> The overall tone is deeply personal, cathartic, biting, and polemical, with flashes of humor and a deliberate attempt to soften the ending.
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> I now learn he's donated significant chunks of money to them.
Biting the hand that feeds you might make you an asshole. But sometimes you have to be an asshole to uphold standards and principles. I don't think Linus or Jobs would be known to produce such important technology if they don't care enough about their works to act crudely to people they consider substandard.
We can disagree with Andrew's standards of course. But saying he should not attack someone just because he took money from him is a weak criticism.
I don't think it's too bad, but I also don't think it's good.
I also don't think Andrew can claim at the end "I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred" when the post includes the sentence "Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs".
It accuses him of presiding over “a shitshow”, and basically seems to imply he’s a greedy narcissist.
So, yes, I find that line laughably disingenuous.
> It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig
I'm not sure that's his aim here. I imagine he has been asked dozens of times what he thinks about the switch, what it means for Zig, etc. etc. and wanted to just address it one time, which is understandable.
The tone is... strong. I think repeating grapevine rumours about Jarred's management skills adds very little and probably could have been removed. But at its heart I see this post as example of a common clash: open source code hackers vs Silicon Valley "growth hackers".
Kelley is disappointed that a promising Zig project took VC money and went from his passion project's prime example to one that shit talked it on the way out. I get why he's emotional. I wouldn't have written it the way he did but I also don't think policing tone is beneficial for honest communication.
There are entire businesses built on sharing "through the grapevine" what management style and working conditions are like at various employers. People want to know these things!
Instead of posting on Glassdoor or whatever the latest iteration of that is, Andrew just wrote it out here (and linked to a forum to back up the claim).
I don't think it's an attack, more like a goodbye.
Andrew is happy bun is not zig anymore because it was not up to the level they would expect from a project that represents them.
Isn't this what makes it so strange, though? You didn't see K&R publish "so-and-so writes bad C", or Stroustrup decrying the Boost maintainers as hacks. Linus used to do this sort of thing, but mostly to things that directly affected the kernel, and even that eventually led to changed behavior and a code of conduct.
The post disclaims the ambassador relationship, but treats Bun as having all of the responsibility of being an ambassador anyway. If Bun is in Zig's house, like the monthly meetings and the core team code review suggest, then somehow the outcome reflects on Zig. If not, then that's fine, but then it begins and ends at "They were a project written in Zig, and now they're not". He can't have both "It's their fault because their code was slop" and "it's not my business".
how is it attacking him for using a different product? except for compile times nothing here even indicates that rust would be a bad choice for bun
I don't think he is attacking, he's just organising his thoughts publicly.
While organizing his thoughts publicly, Andrew says that the Bun team at large engages in outright fabrication. What do we think about that? Does Jarred and his team lie about professional matters to fellow peers in the field?
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Sorry just organizing my thoughts on your comment publicly:
This person is credulous and naive, and I should take care to remember that if I see comments from them in the future.
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It reminded me of the Church of Scientology lashing out at a Suppressive Person.
"An unprofessional embarrassment" is exactly how I feel about Bun.
I don't get mad at people for standing up for their morals, I get mad when they have none. AI is an a-moral tech, and Bun is using it in an a-moral way: for team Bun the ends justify any means.
I'm on team Zig!
I would love to have an unprofessional embarrassment project like Bun on my portfolio.
Agree with you.
This behaviour by the commentariat here on HN seems more like a reflexive revulsion at the discovering of humans with ideals other than money on this globe.
This of course leads to strong internal conflict - it becomes harder to accept yourself not having any morals when confronted by someone pointing it out. Easily resolved by the ego by disparaging the boss of zed instead.
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Ok, then call out those aspects. Don’t call the lead a stinky manager who wrote shitty code.
Criticize the project and methodology, not the person.
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I think he also wants to attack Anthropic by proxy.
I almost completely disagree.
Unprofessional? Maybe a little, but honest, and while the truth isn't flattering to Jarred, I'd say generally kind.
Embarrassing? Not from my seat. Andrew is just revealing the relationship dynamics between a principled programming language developers and pragmatic business users of that language.
I had already inferred a bunch that this post confirms based on the agentic port from forked-Zig to Rust. It's very nice to have suspicions confirmed.
How can you say that a post which has the criticisms it does is kind?
> I'd say generally kind.
How is saying someone wrote “slop” and is stinky kind?
I can’t understand these comments that claim the article was generally kind, unless you and I read different articles with different words.
I legitimately had to go back and check that the article hadn’t been edited to remove some of the ad hominems
How is it kind to imply that by not going to university, Jarred was too stupid to think critically about his own path in life? Or just this in its entirety: "Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective."
We have very different ideas about what kindness looks like. Honesty and rudeness are not synonyms.
Before the post I didn't know what zig and bun is. I needed a llm to explain it to me. Now I think about trying Zig. So, no, I don't think it's childish. It reads like a engineer that knows which kind of people you don't need in your environment. I can feel every word he wrote because I know this situations.
Totally agree. This article really turned me off of ever using Zig for a project.
> This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product.
Well, TFA has a conveniently titled section "Addressing the Blog Post", that raises (setting aside speculation) some good points:
> Or maybe he doesn't care, and just wants to attack Jarred?
I've worked with ark enough that I think I've started to learn his default style, or at the very least to know that from him; this isn't an attack. If that was your read, I think you're taking more from sources that aren't this post.
I wonder if you're confusing statements of fact, for attacks? They're distinct, and the context for the post. I'm sure he's been asked a few, hundred, times what's his take on this decision made by this single person.
> Two, I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred. He has different taste than me, he wants different things out of life than me. [...] Honestly, I think he did well for himself, and I don't wish him any ill will.
> That said I'm happy that our business interests are no longer intertwined! As soon as the Internet stops arguing in public about whether the rewrite was good or bad for Bun based on the language choice, I believe that concludes our interactions.
Translation, Jarred posted his thing, so now Andrew "has" to post his thing: hopefully so the internet will stop asking, and he can ignore this shit he doesn't care about, and people will leave him alone long enough that he can get back to spending his attention on his language, which is all he really wants.
> I've worked with ark enough that I think I've started to learn his default style, or at the very least to know that from him; this isn't an attack. If that was your read, I think you're taking more from sources that aren't this post.
You start by taking more from sources that aren’t this post, then in the very next sentence accuse the other person of doing what you just admitted to.
This article has very clear attacks like calling him a “stinky manager” from literal gossip, or saying he wrote “slop” before LLMs.
If you can’t see these as personal attacks, you are taking more from other sources and your predetermined opinions than the article. That is what you admitted, but I don’t think you realize it.
> I wonder if you're confusing statements of fact, for attacks?
Hearsay and gossip from the "juicy grape vine" along with implying Jarred is too stupid to critically think about his own path in life because he didn't go to university are not exactly statements of fact. They're elitist and vindictive, but those are not synonymous with honest.
> If that was your read, I think you're taking more from sources that aren't this post.
I'd encourage you to reread the post and try to catch how weirdly spiteful and inconsistent it sounds in places:
> But having graduated from the Thiel Fellowship school of thought rather than university...
> Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective.
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.
> Now, it's not our business to police what our users do... We made futile attempts to guide them towards better programming practices.
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> This is unprofessional and embarrassing for Zig
This isn’t like the official stance of the zig foundation or anything. I for one am happy to see people being honest about their frustrations instead of playing politics.
I agree and I’m confused that some other commenters aren’t seeing it.
> The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.
This isn’t about wanting “sanitized corpo-speak” or something, but I do expect leads of projects to behave like adults and not build arguments on ad-hominem attacks and rumors they supposedly heard.
Address the topic and put forth some arguments. I don’t care to hear your personal beef with someone aired publicly.
> Two, I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred
That’s quite a statement to make at the end of a post that seems to contain little else…all just thinly veiled.
Saying someone has „beginner energy“ but reframing it as a faux positive (this person fails and thus learns)
Or saying the grapevine says someone is a „stinky manager“? Basically I’m not saying this person is bad it’s just that I need to bring up on this blog that everyone agrees this person is bad.
All seems to be in very poor taste even if true…
I'm quite confused by this. Is calling someone a "stinky manager" a personal attack? It's funny that we can't differentiate the person from his "job". I work with some shitty managers, but I don't hold it against them on a personal level...
Is calling someone a "stinky manager" a personal attack?
yes!
It may be hard to separate the work and non-work personas of Jarred in particular. I watched an interview with Jarred where the interviewer asked what he liked to do for fun, what were his hobbies outside of work, and so on. His answer was that he liked working on Bun, and that's all he did. I felt a bit sad for him about it: even Linus T. has hobbies (like diving) and has raised a family.
That said, it isn't necessarily the case that workaholics are bad managers, or that they insist on workaholism in their subordinates. We, generally, don't have access to Andrew's rumornet, we can only go off what Jarred's said publicly.
Lol. Imagine you were called a stinky employee, and you thinking that's not a personal attack. Would be very noble of you.
Word-engineer hat on:
> The grapevine was (...), and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.
Per exact words these two are different:
i.e. I might myself not share the sentinment, or not know anything about it, or simply not engage - relay is not an opinion in itself.
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You do your job for hours every week, it is undoubtedly part of you. Calling somebody that is very personal and rude. I'm shocked that there are this many people who don't find issue with it. It removes any kindness from the post and turns it all up to 11. I's deeply personal.
Do some of you really talk to others like this and find no issue with it? It's hard to say words like that and not end up with deep schisms and hatred.
How do these statements read to you:
You’re a shitty programmer!
Vs “your code is bad”.
Who is the subject of these sentences?
Don’t think there is a clear line to draw as to where the person stops and the professional performance starts when it comes to management because on soft skill it is inherently driven by personal attributes. It’s a bit like a good salesman exudes likeability - it’s integral to the performance of the job and part of the person.
He may well be a shit manager. I have no idea. Either way it’s not something you casually throw out there in a blog like this
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Are you serious? If I told you to your face "you are shitty at your job" you don't see that as a personal attack?
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It’s an inconsistent statement to make when the rest of the article contains ad hominem attacks like these:
> The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.
This is a weirdly childish post. I enjoy a good post where someone speaks their mind without running it through the corporate speak filter first, but it also gives you insights into how a person thinks and operates. With good leadership you can strip away the corporate filter and the result is still professional, but this article reveals something much less than professional
I think its worthwhile to hear how some self promoting person is actually a piece of crap.
Beginner energy is faux? I relish my beginner energy in all my side projects - I fail and learn. This is completely normal when done safely and without people depending on you. Unlike management.
> So, when the Anthropic aquisition finally happened, we at ZSF breathed a sigh of relief. When the donation silently stopped, our bank account was ready for it. When they neither canceled their monthly meeting with us, nor showed up, we were not surprised. The relationship was over.
Seen this time and time again, project/organization gets taken over, and everything "good" they did doesn't get exited with fanfare or anything, just silently dropped as your benefactor starts silently ignoring you.
I'm really happy they saw the writing on the all and were prepared for the inevitable, a really great lesson you shouldn't need to learn yourself the hard way, and FOSS project relying on one/two big donators should take heed, we'll see a lot more of this in the developer tooling ecosystem moving forward for sure.
There are astute comments about the post's tone elsewhere in this thread[0]
But this killed my hopes for Zig.
The drama is fun, and Andrew is maybe even admirable in his earnest, but this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project. I know that's boring and uninspired, but that's what I want my tech stack and it's management to be.
Also, maybe Jarred was a net negative, but bun was also a really big project using Zig, and the project leaving isn't as good for Zig as Andrew is making it seem. It genuinely seems he's putting a lot of priority on purity and ideology over just growth of the language. And I am sorry, but adoption and reaching critical mass is an important part of a serious programming language.
[0] esp. nilirl.
> this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project
I don't immediately see how much the seriousness of the project is related to the language the author chose in their personal blog post. It's similar to saying that Linux could not have become a serious project because of the way Linus communicated in his emails.
> It's similar to saying that Linux could not have become a serious project because of the way Linus communicated in his emails.
Linus being rude was actually contributing for Linux becoming a serious project. Because that changed the quality of the code and the seriousness of the contributions. If you were sloppy or did not do good job, Linus became rude. So there is a correlation, and this is an excellent demonstration how it goes to opposite direction. Whether it was professional or not, it correlated for the quality of the project. For that reason, it is not ad hominem.
Linus always backs up his insults with technical reasonings on why the other side is wrong though. You might not agree with his reasons, but at least he provided them.
Yes, jerks love to use Linus’ success to justify being jerks.
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He is understandably annoyed. It feels like you are making it a problem for people to have emotions and give signs that they have those emotions. He didn’t even write anything direct and it is on his personal blog
In what way the article convinced you that Andrew Kelley is not professional enough for a serious project like Zig? Isn't his contribution to the language what's important?
He's leading the community. Not having basic professional does indeed kill them vibe for some of us. When is he going to pile on somebody else he disagrees with?
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> this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project
I actually think this gets to, but steps over, the core objection: traditional "hacker" mindset vs VC "growth hacking" mindset.
> And I am sorry, but adoption and reaching critical mass is an important part of a serious programming language.
Why? Why can't he create a language with exactly the kind of purity and ideology he wants, broader adoption be damned? Why must everything optimize for user growth and mindshare?
> and the project leaving isn't as good for Zig as Andrew is making it seem
In this case, Bun was acquired by Anthropic. Leaving Zig is not necessarily out of merit. As much as they pretend it was.
> this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project
It hasn't stopped Rust's growth, so I doubt this is true.
Most people don't care about this kind of interpersonal drama unless it impacts the actual technology itself.
> And I am sorry, but adoption and reaching critical mass is an important part of a serious programming language.
Would you argue that Chez Scheme (to pick a random example) isn't a "serious programming language"? And I am sorry, but the assumption that "explosive growth" in the venture capital sense is somehow necessary for "success" is cancer.
> Would you argue that Chez Scheme (to pick a random example) isn't a "serious programming language"?
Commercially speaking? Absolutely not a "serious programming language" in this context.
If someone tries to implement a project using Chez Scheme, they better have agreat reason to not use mainstream boring language.
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> but this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project.
Yes, I think you are totally right. I'm sure Linux would never be so big as it is without a maintainer that talks so professional than Linus Torvalds.
linus torvalds was eventually told that his tone was not acceptable and that he needed to learn to tone it down. linux grew despite linus tone, not because of it.
I found this post very refreshing! I’m sure it would have been very tempting to one-up the “PR-speak” of the Bun post. Likewise, it would have been very tempting to include the same set of facts that reflect negatively on Jarred, while studiously concealing one’s own opinion (eg “I heard people called him a stinky manager. I am not saying that, other people are, but I’m not”). I appreciated that it was just … genuine.
Refreshing that the author doesn’t try to conceal his character or thoughts.
The contents of his character and thoughts are quite objectionable though.
It’s just one long ad hominem
I don't think you are using that right. Saying someone is bringing a bad vibe to your project, as the point he has a bad vibe is just stating the conclusion.
Like if someone calls you a bad programmer and doesn't hire you as a programmer, isn't ad hominem
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It isn't. The grapevine stuff was unnecessary and should have been cut out but there is plenty of concrete stuff in there as well.
Part of it might feel like ad hominem, but I think the bluntness is justified in this case. It provides some pretty important context on the situation.
As an outside observer who knew little about Zig and Bun, the impression I got is that the rewrite came out of nowhere, and that the Zig community was surprised by it. The post makes it quite clear that this wasn't the case, and describes how the actions and overall mentality of Bun's creator already suggested such a thing was likely to happen, straight from the mouth of someone who worked with him and isn't afraid to voice his thoughts. Not everything needs to be PR speak.
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Agreed. This blog post strikes the balance between PR-speak and x.com
It's hard, in my opinion, to lend credence to the author here when they decided to devote the first and largest section of their article to an incisive display of speculative ad hominem.
Would have been a great opportunity to outline the benefits of Zig! I've been keen to pick Zig up recently due to mitchellh's evangelism and inspiring writing on the subject.
This article puts me off learning Zig.
> first and largest section of their article to an incisive display of speculative ad hominem.
Seems you're not alone in feeling this, mind quoting the exact and verbatim parts that seem like "speculative ad hominem"? I see there are quite a bits about how Andrew sees Jarred and his workflow/work mentality, but I'm not sure I see clearly what is supposed to be the ad hominem, speculative or not.
Sure:
> he was essentially groomed from a young age
> It's one thing to choose a poor work-life balance for oneself; a different thing entirely to demand it of others
> Jarred was a stinky manager
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The author being the author of zig…
> Would have been a great opportunity to outline the benefits of Zig!
Eh, Google and ChatGPT both exist?
Not sure a personal attack against Jarred really helps the case for using Zig. He could have and should have focused on the language and not “a stinky manager”. Honestly, this makes me want to steer clear of Andrew as much as Jarred.
Its an attack an Jarred's public, (un)professional behaviour. One most of us in the community have born witness too in recent months.
"Jarred, in his professional capacity, drove away many from our community, and we'd prefer to disassociate." is not 'Jarred is a bad person, privately'.
Now, in these circles, that might as well be the same thing, given how little personal life I imagine most VCs have left outside of work. But that's not really Andrew's problem.
I won't defend Andrew's style; I think he could mask some his neurodivergence more when communicating to a wider neurotypical audience. But it's his project, his community is certainly aware, and this too, is a known quantity.
It might help you though, to reread the piece with the assumption that Andrew is being completely sincere, without adding in a secondary subtext like, "Andrew is trying to assassinate Jarred's character".
I think he’s being completely sincere in this attempt to assassinate this person’s character. I say this as someone who before this day regarded Kelley as a role model. Now I see him in the same category as a Musk like character. Don’t blame “unmasked neurodivergence” for this, plenty of neurodivergent people can communicate effectively and professionally to a wide audience without attacking someone’s professional character.
For example, given the number of claims made here there’s very little actual evidence and support. Kelley says Jared is a bad manager and credits rumors. He says he writes slop code and doesn’t provide a single example or prove that statement. If this were his “neurodivergence” coming through I’d expect more thorough argument and less “stinky manager” grade school insults.
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Andrew's online social behavior is largely a streak of pettiness imo. This is not even close to the first time I've seen him write something I felt was overtly mean spirited, not just euphemistically "blunt".
"Was silence not an option?"
i watched a youtube video where he called out people as garbage programmers... i felt that was petty, his streak continues i guess
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Given the chronology set out by Andrew, I think it's warranted anyway.
Makes me want to give him a handshake and a big hug
> I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred
The whole post felt like a personal criticism of Jarred.
I'd consider the opinions professional criticisms of Jarred. While focused on him individually I don't think they are very personal
Personal and professional are not mutually exclusive.
If I criticize your code, that is a professional criticism.
If I criticize your code and say it reflects your consistent carelessness and stupidity, it is also personal.
If I say you fabricated something, then that is a personal criticism, it alleges an ethical violation. In a professional context, it's also a professional criticism (every profession has some ethical standards).
> We probably tried to tell you to try enabling it and you didn't listen. We have good advice, damn it!
Not knowing whether you actually gave the advice you're blaming them for not taking isn't professional, it instead comes across as bitter.
i think they are extremely personal and actually very distinct from professional criticisms.
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And literally 3 sentences later he goes back to insulting him ("productivity fantasy fever dream"). Even if that is true, it's still an unwise post to publish in this form IMHO. If the goal was to defend Zig, that could've been done in a less personal manner.
I'm about to comment exactly this.
I think he messed that part up and it comes off as passive aggressive but he is probably scared of the “outrage” from the angels of the internet about how rude he was to Jarred
[flagged]
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.
I don't see anything business related in that statement.
What's this new level of gaslighting? "It was not because of me, but because of the business situation I was in". Wait... wasn't he in that "business situation" because of actions HE took?
“Jarred was a stinky manager”. Is this professional criticism?
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To me, this whole effort of rewriting Bun from Zig to Rust looks like a big marketing move. The question is: if Anthropic AI is really that powerful, why not just fix the bugs and give it the more ambitious task of redesigning the existing Bun Zig codebase in a way that eliminates not only the current bugs but also prevents similar ones from happening in the future?
The sole reason for that rewrite was Zig creator announcing he won't be accepting AI contributions. It hurt Anthropic's feelings.
Conversely we have actual evidence of Bun rewriting in Rust because Andrew wouldn't accept AI contributions, actually hurt Andrew's feelings.
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[citation needed]
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I do wonder to what degree this weird play originated from Anthropic, versus from an overeager founder selling past the close.
I can imagine Anthropic wanting to acquire Bun without the gimmicks.
IMHO 'marketing' as a supposed incentive is too easily thrown around by people who probably don't know what marketing really is.
It is worth noting that before rewriting in Rust, Bun maintained a fork used to accelerate the compilation and informed those who asked that this fork could never be merged due to Zig's zero-LLM policy.
A few weeks later, Bun began the Rust rewrite. Although not explicitly stated, I suspect these two events may be related.
But Rust is exactly the tooling that gives humans and LLMs a lot of those checks for free, and things like RAII.
If you use Rust the way it was designed to be used, rather than relying on countless "unsafe" blocks, you need to redesign the entire codebase architecture to make it compatible with the borrow checker rules.
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Well either Claude cannot fix those bugs or it can but the Bun team decided to not fix those bugs on purpose.
Not sure which is worse.
zig doesn't accept ai written code
How is Bun codebase connected to Zig codebase?
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"effort" is a big word to describe typing out a few prompts to create something with 5k+ open issues.
"Typing out a few prompts" does not match the process described in Jarred's article. https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust
Static guarantees are better than stochastic parrots. A static linger beats telling Claude "check this idiom". Etc etc.
[dead]
What a complete own goal. I wouldn't want to have anything to do with Zig if there's a chance the head of the ZSF writes a blog that contains a substantial portion of unsubstantiated, unattributed personal attacks directed toward me.
Maybe Jarred wasn't easy to work with, but that doesn't mean that it's a good idea to publicly air all the dirty laundry. He at least seemed to have his heart in the right place by donating a substantial amount to the project.
> You can imagine how we might want to put some social distance between ourselves and a project whose irresponsible software engineering practices invite the exact kind of criticism that people are eager to level.
The other (very salient) points notwithstanding, I'm afraid this quote shows that Zig hasn't learned a lesson that other languages of its generation (and older) have: if a project's memory safety depends only on "responsible engineering practices", then that project most likely won't be memory safe. Quoting the "swiss cheese" model used in risk management: one slice of cheese (engineering practices) just isn't enough if you want to be reasonably sure your program is memory safe.
I mean, case in point. (One of?) Zig's largest adopted projects who was donating $60,000 a year made by a contributor that worked directly with Andrew... Was not "stinky" engineering.
If Bun can't get it right starting in 2026 with all of Zig's tooling and someone who worked on the language, what hope does my random team have?
Especially when we could, instead, use Rust. With a larger community to boot.
I’m reminded of the hierarchy of controls in machine safety. If you can’t eliminate the hazard, or substitute a less hazardous thing, then engineering out the hazard (like Rust did) is preferable to a procedural control (“git gud at engineering”).
Can you elaborate on the distinction between "eliminate the hazard" as the first choice and "engineering out the hazard" as a fallback approach?
In my safety background (recently aerospace, ARP4754/4761), removing and avoiding the hazard are essentially equivalent, with reducing the likelihood and mitigating its effects acceptable if you can't remove or avoid the hazard, and procedure is also the least preferred mechanism.
C/C++ with static code analysis is not worse than Rust. But most Rust developers are beginners during there are many C/C++ developers with 20+ years knowledge. So whats exactly is the point in using Rust?
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C/C++ does not care and they’re currently the language for foundational work (OS, platforms, and libraries). Python and Java does not care, they will just throw runtime exceptions and crash. Rust care, but they don’t play well with the rest of the world.
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Despite stated otherwise in the post, this is a personal attack.
Anyway, let's try to discuss something more technical: I predict Zig will lose steam, and in 2027, will lose relevance:
1) It's hardcore Anti-AI 2) It's moved to Codeberg 3) It doesn't have the momentum to sustain the disadvantages of these two decisions
The project will in max 2 years make a blog post, not admitting to their mistakes, telling themselves that Zig is a success, despite the industry having moved on.
They don't have a goal of becoming a popular language, though and will continue to work on it as long as there are donations. They don't care about being mainstream and there are niche companies who appreciate Zig and donate.
> I'm hustling. I'm playing the game. I'm doing what it takes to make this thing mainstream and a viable, practical choice for individuals and companies. If you talk shit about Zig in public, I'm going to fight back. But I respect you. I see you. I understand you. I don't hate you. I would literally buy you a drink.
Andrew Kelley - An Open Letter to Everyone I've Butted Heads With (2025 Aug 29) https://andrewkelley.me/post/open-letter-everyone-butted-hea...
Reminds me of another language that I used to know...
For real though, if your goal as a language isn't to become popular then why should anyone learn it? Why should anyone spend their limited time building libraries in it when the language isn't likely to grow (and thus is more likely to disappear)?
To be honest, I'm also leaning this way, especially because of the hardcore anti-AI stance, so much that Zig will close security vulnerability issues on Codeberg if you mention that they were found with LLMs. I don't think that this is a good approach.
I also think Zig has a rough road ahead, but not because of AI or moving to codeberg. No, it's because Andrew isn't really a BDFL. He's at best a DFL. The project is already mostly closed off to external contributors.
It kind of reminds me of Elm in a way. Though I'm not expecting 6 years of drought just yet.
4) It's led by an emotionally unintelligent individual who will personally attack you for choosing alternative products.
Like Linus?
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wow this is the most professional comment I've ever seen in this thread.
It's a conflict of core values, and you've demonstrated it here.
You have defined success (for a project, and possibly a person too) as solely 'relevance'.
Jarred would agree with you wholeheartedly, I imagine. Andrew would ask you to leave.
It's okay to have different values and part ways.
It's not wise, however, to project your personal values onto other people, and judge them on those fabricated merits. You'll end up frustrated and confused more often than not.
Judge their choice of values. Judge them on their alignment with their chosen values.
As an example, Andrew doesn't like Jarred's chosen 'Silicon Valley' values, but thinks that Jarred aligns himself well with those values. This feels as a personal attack to you who also holds those values. And on some level, a person intimating you core values suck couldn't be more personal.
> Anyway, let's try to discuss something more technical:
I'll note that this is followed by an entirely non-technical statement of opinion.
something more cybernetic, my friend :)
Could just as easily say the same thing about Bun.
If one can easily swap in the next new js engine du jour…
what's the problem in moving to codeberg?
One funny thing is that if you go on codeberg and want to submit a PR to Zig, you can't. Because Zig's too big for Codeberg, and you're over your free quota, so you can't push your update to your fork.
Yes there are ways around it if you have patience, but what the heck!!
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the loss of network effect.
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It's not where people are, it's not boosted by Google/$AI.
Your prediction is extremely short sighted, and I can only guess it is because of your extreme pro-AI stance, as well as not being part of the open-source community.
Yes that's true, I'm biased because I am pro-AI.
What are your hopes and predictions for the Zig project?
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If you bothered to actually learn just a little bit about the Zig project, you'll know that they are doing ok. They never cared about introducing new features at a fast speed, having lots of contributors, or getting corporate sponsorship, if that's not already obvious from the article. In fact, they intentionally keep a distance from all of that to make the project more sustainable and less prone to the whims of corporations.
> The main problem, however, was code quality.
> The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it.
Perhaps the amount of bugs comes from using a C-like language that requires meticulous manual care to avoid writing runtime bugs.
Even C++ would be a safer choice because of RAII.
When you have to dedicate significant resources to avoid/fix runtime issues that are made impossible at compile time by other languages, the programmer isn't entirely at fault.
Memory safety problems are still possible in the new Rust Bun:
People bring this up a lot. What I see here is that thousands of potentially (not actually, just potentially) safety risks have been neatly tagged in the code.
If you took a program written in Zig, Go, C++, or C, you would have no idea which parts of the code were potentially unsafe. In those languages, the entire program is one big unsafe{} block.
Rust isolates unsafe code. Having them explicitly tagged means they're isolated and can be eradicated over time, if need be. Though in many cases, unsafe blocks are quite safe.
Yes - I think the proof of the pudding will be whether they put in the effort to eliminate these unsafe blocks. The conversion to Rust is the starting point that makes this possible, but it's definitely not "done" at this point.
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Yes but through iterative ratcheting, some portion of that unsafe can likely be migrated to idiomatic code without unsafe. And the other 96% of the code now has more mechanical guarantees than it did before.
Static linting in Rust via clippy also makes it pretty straightforward to begin enforcing things like "unsafe blocks need to have safety doc comments" as a CI warning or failure, and there are community tools that focus on this topic too.
I can't stand the practice of "LLM porting" personally but if you're going to do a mechanical rewrite from something else into Rust, this (permit unsafe and unidiomatic but 1:1 translation at first) is a fairly reasonable strategy imo.
> 78% of those blocks are a single line — a pointer that came from C++, or one call into a C library
Don't those blocks need some additional lines for error checking to prevent the unsafety from spreading to the safe code?
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Possible, yes. But it's not like it's terribly difficult to verify correct usage of "unsafe" that amounts to a basic function call to a C library. Trivial uses of unsafe are pretty innocuous.
dude was writing slop before A.I. Andrew called him out.
I don't write Rust - but I sure know that I'm not supposed to use 'unsafe'.
You have to put similar amount of resources when writing in Rust as well. With the difference that it’s more front loaded. Personally I’m a fan of Rust’s approach but the price for having bug free code has to be paid, regardless, one way or the other.
C++ would also introduce a myriad other subtle safety problems that would require years of expertise to even notice.
I'd like to see an example
I’ve not seen any languages that does not require meticulous care to avoid runtime bugs. Type checking and lifetime ownership eliminate some, but not all of them.
> Type checking and lifetime ownership eliminate some, but not all of them.
They actually remove certain classes completely. E.g. lifetime ownership in Rust removes all bugs related to the reason why it is in the code syntax (a.k.a. lifetime markers remove use-after-free completely in Rust.)
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So less meticulous care then?
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That "I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred" made me do a spit take, because a majority of what I had just read was absolutely a personally targeted criticism of Jarred.
Whether that's "okay" is a totally separate issue. I have no idea what the history here is, or whether this is warranted. But that was absolutely a personal criticism!
I don’t even understand why write this? So much code gets rewritten. Typescript 7 has just been rewritten from TS to Go, yielding much better performance. They chose Go over Rust because TS codebase looks more like the Go one.
No one is throwing chicken tendies over it. Countless other examples. Big deal
I don’t use Zig and I never will - the gushing fan base that has top-loaded fuzzy feels over technical superiority has made that certain, but this is not even a language to language debate. This is just sour grapes. But it sounds like even the people here now don’t want to use Zig due to how it makes them feel. Oh well.
A better title would be 'My emotions on the Bun Rust Rewrite', since the article feels like an emotional reaction rather than a thoughtful analysis of the situation. Give it some time..
I'm rooting for Zig either way, even though I have nothing against Rust and I don't directly use bun.
I was wrong to be upset this whole time that the rewrite would hurt Zig. This is one of those rare occasions when I’m glad I was wrong. Interesting insights.
I don't think Bun actually matters much, even for web development. For sure there is a lot of enthusiasm, but all the production systems I know continue to use Node.js and are not moving to Bun any time soon. In the "real world" not that many people care about it.
I agree with you, but Bun was still something of a flagship project for Zig. It received a lot of attention, which indirectly helped Zig's popularity.
Exactly, it's some niche thing not a lot of people care about in my opinion. I certainly don't.
I find this sad, as I use Bun as a Node.js replacement that works really well. I wanted improved builds times and run speed. Both things bun provided. It reduced ram usage and worked with the node ecosystem well.
So for some workflows it looked like a flat improvement on all parts.
I work on a site with millions of users and we use bun...
well, for me personally, "the" Zig project is not Bun but Ghostty, and it always has been.
yeah, Mitchell is very pro-AI, but he is thoughtful, and he sometimes highlights the difference between Zig's and Ghostty's approaches to LLMs (outright ban vs taming)
Yeah and Andrew Kelley is anti AI for his project because it’s counter to the projects learning goals. I think it’s perfectly fine for a project to determine if AI contributions are accepted. Maybe that means change is slower in that project, maybe that means things are more deliberate too.
OSS projects can survive not being on GitHub, Python was something like 20 years was not on gh. If the service has severe outages and there are alternatives why wouldn’t you move? Most people aren’t contributing to the runtime anyways, they are just using the language.
I have a working port of ghostty to rust ... not even kidding
Anyone who would write an article like this is much more distasteful to me than anything Jarred did.
Why? I think the original blog post, which he is replying to, demands a reply.
Its a breath of fresh air to get this whole debate out in the open
I do not think the original blog post demands a reply. Zig people have already written about this. I found the original blog post quite complimentary of Zig and the community.
It is challenging for me to imagine how one would think an article like this is net beneficial for the community rather than reacting with grace.
Jared’s post was entirely technical, this post was mostly personal.
Jared has behaved appallingly in recent months. Comments about locking out humans from open source code contributions and the gaslighting at the start of the migration are top of mind.
articles like these are needed - if you've to call people out - do it.
the tech industry's fake politeness has caused pain and confusion.
& yeah - I had already stayed off Bun before the whole rewrite, but now more reasons.
I think people have read so much corporate PR posts they think that is a rule of how to post online.
This post is his personal blog, he is a human writing what he thinks.
If this was a tweet people would be fine with it, but it is a blog so he should make it corporate-y
"If this was a tweet people would be fine with it"
Actually, some folks do care about how the leader and public face of a project conduct themselves regardless of venue. If a different public figure ie some CEO wrote something reprehensible about some particular ethnic group, is it more excusable or forgivable if they did it on their personal social media account rather than the company blog? Same basic thing.
Public writing in a personal space is still public writing. Being held accountable for publicly stated views is an inherent part of sharing them in public, no?
When I read about the bun rewrite I thought no sh*t, those are the exactly the types of bugs I would expect when doing a line by line rewrite of a program in a GC language to memory managed.
I was unimpressed with the engineering from the blog, and I'm not surprised to read andrew say they claimed no fuzz testing. I know someone who interviewed at bun when it was less than 10 people (around 5 he said). Allegedly jared lowballed the fk out of my friend, claimed they had no money because they're a startup, then proceeded to offer <1% equity
I think I'm missing something; neither zig nor rust are GC languages. Did bun originally start off in javascript or something, and the rewrite you're referring to is from JS to zig?
First line of the original article (not including the disclosure)
> Bun started as a line-for-line port of esbuild's JavaScript & TypeScript transpiler from Go to Zig
Then proceeded to talk about use after free bugs, leaks, and other things that wouldn't exist in GC written programs. Ironically, my friend jared lowballed is an expert in C, runtimes and threading
Why are we so eager to dismiss the very personal experiences of Andrew - someone who envisioned and developed Zig from the ground up? It is entirely within the realm of possibility that what he describes here did transpire. He had bad experiences with one of the more popular projects within the ecosystem - something that he hoped would become successful but the incentives were clearly misaligned.
When in doubt - look at the incentives. And the incentives here are fairly obvious. On one hand we have an open source project that is focused on quality and craftsmanship, and on the other hand we have the world's biggest AI company.
I am not anti-AI. But things like taste and quality matter. And I trust the creator of Zig more than the creator of Bun when it comes to said taste.
> But things like taste and quality matter. And I trust the creator of Zig more than the creator of Bun when it comes to said taste.
Having read both articles I'm in the opposite corner. I found Andrew's personal ad-hominem filled emotional post distasteful and Jarred's purely technical and filled with praise of Zig well written and in good taste.
But it wasn't full of praise for Zig. It specifically pointed out that his project written in zig was full of memory safety bugs, and said that there was no way to get around that if the project stayed with zig. It's ludicrous!
Dedicating most of the article to a personal attack and then finishing by saying that you don't have anything against the person is a bit of an odd sequence.
>There's a dichotomy being presented here where you have to either choose a "style guide" or a programming language feature in order to avoid bugs. The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it. You're not giving TigerBeetle nearly enough credit.
In a post-Rust world I really don't like the rebuttal for eschewing memory-safety is always "you aren't engineering hard enough". The guys at TigerBeetle are "real engineers" and don't need memory safety. If I'm spending most of my time manually chasing memory errors, I didn't "real engineer" hard enough.
Chasing esoteric memory bugs are the worst kinds of bugs to pin down. They are always non-obvious (because if they were they would be fixed) and almost always non-deterministic. I'm just can't escape feeling like new memory unsafe languages are just hobby projects.
I've chased down plenty of esoteric bugs in my career and memory safety ones were usually the easiest. There are tools like valgrind, address sanitizer, etc. that help with those, or, like you said, there are memory safe languages (any interpreted language, for example). I've dealt with even harder to find bugs from things such as:
- misunderstood specifications
- missing else clause to an if statement
- wires with the insulation rubbed off in an embedded system with a mechanical design flaw
- accidental endless loops starving all other tasks
- priority inversion
- string encoding problems
- byte order problems
- etc., etc.
From everything I've read now about this bun project, I won't be surprised to hear that it continues to have lots of bugs even after this rewrite to rust
Thank you Andrew for sharing your side of the story. We can see that the relationship with Bun and Jarred was far from easy. You say it with your own words and even if it sounds bitter I like it much more than some bland AI assisted content.
> There's a dichotomy being presented here where you have to either choose a "style guide" or a programming language feature in order to avoid bugs. The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it. You're not giving TigerBeetle nearly enough credit. Quite simply they put in the time to find and eliminate the bugs, they make an effort to maintain a healthy relationship with ZSF, and Bun did not do that.
This is not a compelling sales pitch. The point of using a memory-safe language is not needing to put in extra work to avoid use-after-free or out-of-bounds memory access.
It would have been more reassuring to hear that Zig has its own memory safety story that should also be able to prevent most of the same bugs. But instead the answer is "work harder for the same result."
When Zig was first created, Rust looked genuinely harder to use because the borrow checker is so demanding and its errors sometimes so hard to reason about and fix. It made Zig look much simpler and easier by comparison. But now, LLMs are very good at writing Rust. I've been writing Rust using LLMs for weeks and haven't thought about the borrow checker once.
AI made Rust tractable without heroic effort, and in doing so eroded one of Zig's major advantages.
The point about compile times is taken though. Rust is definitely slow to compile, easier to believe it's slower than Zig.
Andrew could have been more tactful in his blog post (though as I've grown older I often find less tact to be more effective), but it really sounds like accommodating Bun was a net negative for Zig.
I wouldn't call it beginner energy, though I understand it might seem like that. Rather, it's an approach to development and no amount of time changes it.
Bun's bundler claimed the bottom place in my recent analysis of how JavaScript tools handle generating inline script tags[1], because despite making lofty promises about being able to bundle applications into standalone HTML files, it produced a baffling combination of spurious syntax errors and miscompilations when presented with tricky code.
I'm pretty sure the version I tested was the Zig one (have they made a stable release of the Rust rewrite yet?). So I can definitely see how Bun's move-fast-and-break-things philosophy would have been a poor fit for the Zig community, even prior to the Rust rewrite.
[1] https://carter.sande.duodecima.technology/inline-script-pitf...
Am I right in thinking the Bun rewrite hasn't actually been released yet? There was a big kerfuffle when it was merged to master and people seemed to be behaving like that meant it was all done and dusted (as does this article), but it looks like the last release is still 1.3.14 from April so presumably general users are still on the Zig version? Is there a timeline for release?
It's shipping soon https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust and has been shipping in Claude Code for the last three weeks https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust .
i think the blog post was very honest and direct and i could not agree more with andrew, now i’m not a zig user and i don’t find the language itself pleasing but it’s just a matter of taste,
i admire a few things in zig community, the focus on human relationship with learning and discovery and the focus on performance and building a meaningful relationship with members of community, I wish all the best to the zig and its community, although i have heard a few years ago that andrew was making apologies for not having enough diversity (race and skin colour wise) which i guess was a very dumb statement, but hey we all make dumb statements!
I really admire his stance on AI and agentic code contribution and the joy that they find in crafting good tools.
Andrew Kelly be like "You give major beginner energy, you're a bad manager, your code is trash and I was soo happy when you left" and then ends with "this is not personal criticism BTW"
Couldn't even get himself to say "thanks" for receiving $120,000 from the guy by the way, could only manage "that was cool"
Yikes, the majority of this blog post is saying basically "skill issue" and "Jarred bad engineer", but I think that hurts Zig far more than Andrew realises.
If Bun, a disaster of engineering apparently, simply just switches to Rust and all of their issues magically disappear... then the Rust Vs Zig war is over before it started right?
Yet to be determined. The rust port isn't fully released yet. That might be why they hurried and declared victory now instead of waiting until later?
Sounds like Andrew is using the same argument as Bjarne Stroustrup: if you use it right, you don't write bugs. It hasn't really worked out for C++.
He's not.
> "There's a dichotomy being presented here where you have to either choose a "style guide" or a programming language feature in order to avoid bugs. The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it. You're not giving TigerBeetle nearly enough credit. Quite simply they put in the time to find and eliminate the bugs, they make an effort to maintain a healthy relationship with ZSF, and Bun did not do that."
The reference to TigerBeetle is important, and a bit under-explained for the point he's trying to make. They have consistently attributed things like design and deterministic simulation testing to their success and reliability, which has nothing to do with Zig as a language. Some things might be _easier_ in Zig, such as static memory allocation, but ultimately, a holistic approach brings success, not one individual tool used "right".
But is TigerBeetle then even reasonable reference as an argument for Zig? Maybe they could have reached the same with plain C.
How this should have gone:
"Dear Diary,
Today I didn't post a response to a blog post that levelled minimal criticisms at my project.
Below is the full text I didn't post."
> The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.
Interesting I wonder if its something Jarred did locally or something else that was just not widely done by the whole team? I dont like to make bad assumptions about devs or dev teams without first asking. I owe credit to HN for one of the guidelines which states something like do not assume intentional malice in comments, I feel like we assume the worst in general about other devs, but people are imperfect and make mistakes.
That said as others noted this post could have been written a bit differently while still pointing out genuine issues. The ad hominem attacks are a bit unnecessary and add nothing of value to what could have been a better response.
It's more like a transpile, far from idiomatic rust.
As an outside observer with no horse in this race I think this post its more about the feelings of Andrew than pure technical content. He must surely feel frustated about Bun's migration to Rust and what it means for Zig, but it reads as sour grapes.
Compare the tone of this post to the one from Jarred about the Rust migration from yesterday, that one reads like a sensible technical document (no matter what you feel about the AI assisted migration).
This one reeks of hurt ego to me. Hell hath no fury like a language creator scorned.
Just 12 hours [1] before I wrote on HN how I hope Zig won't do a hostile reply to Jarred's blog post.
I was half expecting it to be from Loris Cro, being VP of community for Zig. But was really hoping Andrew would write one himself, hopefully being more diplomatic.
I was wrong.
Even if everything that was listed in the blog was true, it could have been either not mentioned, or in all cases put it in much better way. And that is why copywriter are worth something.
Disagreeing on AI, How to run its business, low salary for Zig's job hurts the Zig foundation, Code quality, meaning on Fuzzing etc. Instead a lot of this now reads to me as direct attack. It could have been written as a heavy disagreement in a much more professional manner.
And no, professional doesn't mean cooperate speak.
Considering the Internet was on Zig's side when Bun switch to Rust was brewing.
Sigh.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842172
I’m not sure why this post even exists? It feels completely unnecessary. Don’t get me wrong, I like drama as much as the next guy, but it didn’t have to be public imo
I like zig a lot, I share its core philosophy, and I generally agree with Andrew's views. I found this article interesting, and I think it is understandable in all of this to be a bit bitter towards Bun and Jarred - in some sense, it had turned into a big "If you don't use Rust in 2026 you are stupid" which directly hurts the Zig project.
Personally, I prefer zig over most other languages. I find "memory-safety" is bought at the price of code that is not straightforward to reason about and requiring a steep learning curve. The reader's working memory is filled up quickly with language constructs and crutches rather than with the actual logic of the code at hand. I have used C++ for a large part of my professional career and eventually got so annoyed by always having to cross-reference multiple files to check which behavior might be used by which constructor and things like that. I have written a big and critical system in pure C once, just to try, and while I would not do it again, diligence and testing resulted in virtually zero runtime failures across its lifespan - while it was always possible to quickly reason about all the logic that tied low-level hardware access and near-realtime requirements together in a way much more visible than hidden behind layers of "safe" abstraction. Zig is, for me, the sweet spot: It solves the terrible issues that plain C has, and adds a lot of convenience on top that does not obscure the logic, while encouraging but not enforcing safe patterns.
Why do I feel like reading the post of someone jealous or with low self esteem issues? Zig was not a good fit so why does it have to be a personal attack on the Bun maintainer over his life choices and his management decisions? Whatever beef you have with someone it should not be « zig is for elite and you are just an evil corporate maintainer because you are holding it wrong »
Because of that's what it is. Pure jealousy and personal attack in the veil of "it's not a personal attack bro" blog post
Zig is getting that Elm, etc vibe. Genius/visionary BFDL who's also personally incapable of leading the project towards healthy long-term viability.
Say what you will about Matz or José Valim, I don't think they'd ever write a "and don't let the door hit you on the way out" screed full of personal attacks ("stinky manager", "writing slop", "a total shit show") against a person who led a very prominent project and financially supported the language.
Other people (not meaning this about you) very frequently seem to throw around the BFDL acronym uncritically without remembering or caring that Benevolent is the first word in there.
This blog post is mostly made up of pettiness and is not an isolated incident - he is often pretty "spicy" or downright hostile in comments sections when making an appearance.
I am sorry but andrew is no where near the level of Evan imo
So is this guy going to dress down any project that decides to move off of Zig? If Mitchell Hashimoto decides to move Ghostty off of Zig to C or Rust will we get a scathing blog post about that too?
Why would you extrapolate to that conclusion?
While I understand ZSF's bittersweet relationship with Oven and agree to several points (especially preparedness), this writing is badly structured and that shows something. Hope to see him turning around.
> The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it.
I was on a platform team and I had a constant backlog of bugs (introduced by others) that I was working on and the two most impactful things for preventing bugs were Typescript and Cypress (playwright-like testing before playwright).
I've dealt with many shitty code bases and the only way that worked for removing bugs was automation. It didn't matter how many bodies you threw at the problem.
> Then why are you saying you have so many annoying bugs in the Zig code? What happened to the test suite being sufficient to catch everything?
You can't use tests for trying to catch use after frees and other memory bugs for the same reason you can't use unit tests as a replacement for type checking, the combinatorial explosion of possible inputs into functions makes unit testing types across an entire project impossible.
Anyway, Jared donated $60k a year to this project and tried to resolve this in the most diplomatic way possible and still got personally attacked. The lesson from this article is don't donate to the Zig project because if you migrate away from it they will try to ruin your reputation.
edit: changed month to year
> Anyway, Jared donated $60k a month to this project
$60k per year, which amounts to $5k per month. Still, nothing to be sneered at.
> I've dealt with many shitty code bases and the only way that worked for removing bugs was automation. It didn't matter how many bodies you threw at the problem.
Can't say my experience matches yours. Types do seem to structurally reduce some varieties of bugs, but ultimately the only reliable way I've seen to close the gap is hire disciplined people who care about, and thoughtfully consider, what they build.
E.g., the shittiest codebases I've ever seen were TypeScript. It in no way prevents you writing bugs or slop
> but ultimately the only reliable way I've seen to close the gap is hire disciplined people who care about, and thoughtfully consider, what they build.
You were able to turn around a codebase that was growing its bug count exponentially by changing an entire company's hiring practices?
I really don't believe in the "just don't be stupid" or "don't hire stupid people" approach to things. If it works, it only works at a small scale and once things become urgent enough, things fall apart.
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“no open source project will succeed with this level of unprofessionalism”
y’all clearly are not acquainted with some of the things Linus has said on the LKML
Or the systemd guys, or the OpenBSD guys, or the GNU guys, or the Open Source guys, or the Oracle guy, or the Apple guy, or the Microsoft guys, or just about any leader of a big project/corporation
reminds me of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qEbqPitYhWHthwFNu/bun-s-migr.... remember anthropic owns bun
I'm glad LLM coding exists for people who want to move at an insane superhuman speed (perhaps they're trying to achieve escape velocity and launch into the stars or something) so that they don't grind down their fellow humans.
You can either do local optimization - a single individual moving as fast and as hard as humanly possible, or global optimization - a team working together and amplifying each other's efforts to produce something that is greater than the sum of its parts.
The project needs an adult in the room - preferably someone less on the spectrum - who approves this content before it goes out. This reads as an incredibly butthurt, petulant rant, authored by someone deeply hurt that users are putting all the blocks into the square hole. Andrew would have been served better by a Linus-style curt takedown, rather than this drivel.
Agreed. Valid criticism and concerns are drowned out by personal feelings. Probably should have ran his post by an AI.
> preferably someone less on the spectrum
Are you implying that this reads as all those bad things because Andrew is supposedly autistic? And that if he were to not supposedly have autism, this post wouldn't have read as all those bad things? This reads as an incredibly ableist post authored by someone who thinks autism is an insurmountably negative thing and that someone with "sufficient" autism shouldn't run a project. As if autism is a percentage where once you get past 33% you immediately become incompetent. Be better.
[flagged]
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Did everyone forget how when the news first broke, Jared told everyone to calm down; it wasn’t a big deal? That was very deceitful to me.
Jared seems like the typical SV tech bro who deserves this type of personal disrespect, but of course 90% of people on this site would love to him and wouldn’t understand.
The callout about auditing inline and comptime reminds exactly of the C++ point made about how you have to follow the style guide. Whoosh?
I've watched an interview with Andrew Kelley: https://youtu.be/iqddnwKF8HQ where he seemed much more chill and level-headed.
The blog post looks a bit distasteful if I'm honest. I was expecting a technical writeup explaining why it was/wasn't a good fit for zig.
> He gets to live out his productivity fantasy fever dream, he's probably already super wealthy. He has minor tech celebrity status.
Looks like a backhanded personal comment? This didn't need to be in the article.
> It's almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article.
> The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.
Smells like a lot of bias coming in. The fuzzing part was not a fabrication.
> sufficient to catch bugs in 1 million lines of unreviewed slop?
I don't understand how even today software engineers are calling LLM written code slop? It's objectively much better than what most of the engineers write, and it's not stopping to get better. If you still believe this, try out any frontier model on any work that you are currently doing, that should change your mind. There still are like 1% of cases where LLMs are not that good, but even there almost all of the time the issue is in the engineer's steering, not the LLM.
> There's a dichotomy being presented here where you have to either choose a "style guide" or a programming language feature in order to avoid bugs.
He says this, but doesn't give the steps to solve this?
> we all felt at ZSF that Bun was a net liability. > "It Tastes Like It's Not My Problem Anymore" > influx of tasteless AI enthusists into Zig communities
This may be the stance that encouraged Bun to leave.
When you said that “His code was slop well before LLMs” got a good cackle out of me.
The fact is, most people don’t have taste and haven’t had taste, LLMs just amplify what was already there. Good taste is good taste, slop is slop, and shit is shit.
Glad you guys were able to go your separate ways.
It feels like the first half of blog post is less of "thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite" and more "I don't like Jarred, he's a bad programmer and manager".
Maybe I'm wrong, but it strongly feels this way. I'm not saying that Andrew is right or wrong, it's just that you could throw out most of the first half of the post and not lose anything actually on topic.
> But having graduated from the Thiel Fellowship school of thought rather than university, he was essentially groomed from a young age into uncritically embracing the Silicon Valley mindset, and he took venture capital.
> Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective.
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
Andrew is right. I’m sure his emotions come through here, but his take on these things lines up with everything I’ve seen.
Same. After following the drama on HN and Twitter it's pretty clear Jarred has been intentionally doing something that's hurting Zig/Bun community. What I've seen check out with those statements in the post
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I mean I wouldn’t want to work for Andrew Kelley either. Doesn’t mean I don’t see utility in zig. Taking swings at a pretty toxic culture (silicon valley) while refreshing also paints a target on your back. This isn’t unhinged shit though so it hasn’t dissuaded me from learning Zig
I sincerely don't understand why speaking from a personal perspective to another person is considered a bad thing.
Andrew is Zig's leader, and he is defending himself and his project from what he perceived as damaging. Jarred did the same.
We are human beings. We have interpersonal relationships. We enter relationships, and we also leave them.
Also, calling this "drama" in a pejorative way is a simplistic, head in the sand attitude. Again, we are human beings, and our interactions are going to involve drama.
The tone used in his personal blog was personal. I would have expected a more professional one if the post had been on sites related to the ZSF. Both would have had the same goal: to express the feeling of a partnership that ended on bad terms.
Ex-Bun employee for transparency. I have skin in the game.
I respect andrewrk and Jarred in different ways. My understanding are that neither are media trained. Very patronizing post from andrewrk and shows his hostility towards Jarred. I mostly agree with the core meat and potatoes of his post, but the hostile tone, the snarky VC-related remarks, the fact that *most* of his comments felt like a defensive remark.
Yes -- bun has problems. Yes -- bun moves very quickly. Yes -- the 1.4 post seems quite heavily copy-written. Yes -- Jarred doesn't have a syseng background.
But god fucking damn Andrew, you have some problems too -- you have your head up your ass. Every Zig feature that people would love to have, which you personally disagree with will NEVER enter Zig. Why do I still need anonymous structures for lambdas? Sure, no closures I get, but no lambdas? My friends at Tesla tried Zig and then churned to Rust too, for the very same questionable leadership model. Zig will never be a general purpose language because the people -- who have many different generic and general purposes for a language -- simply don't get what they want. Zig is an andrewrk-purpose language at best. Is this leadership for the future of Zig?
I don't want to slander andrewrk. With the brief hiss I've provided, I think he does a more-or-less great job with Zig. It's a really small team, and they're really productive too. The ZSF is a really nice set of people too, from my brief fly-on-the wall moments with meetings with them. They care about Zig and they work really darn hard for it. I've also learned a huge amount from andrewrk, and I respect that he's an off-the-cuff guy. Surprisingly, I am too. Chances are, in his shoes, I'd probably get equally rage-baited to write a similar post.
But reflecting upon this, this is just not productive. These kind of public outlashes are not healthy for the language, don't cause good publicity, and could have been a useful reflection point for the ZSF -- not in terms of money, but in terms of what they want to do with the language. Instead of being a strawman at Jarred, it could have been:
- Bun's not the greatest code quality. (And it really isn't -- I was very stressed by this at work) - Zig doesn't aim to give you tools to manage complexity. We expect the developer to adhere to high code quality. (And this is also very true, coming from C++ -- I was also very stressed by this reality.) - The AI-generated rewrite is not a good idea for reasons XYZ (and I personally think this is true). - We are grateful for Bun being part of the ecosystem, but agree it doesn't adhere to our ethos, nor design philosophy, so it makes sense.
The discussion in the Rust circles (which I am a part of too) is completely different and so much more nuanced -- folks are talking about the code, how many unsafes there are, some of the very valid concerns, but the tone is significantly less enraged.
This is a perfectly legal, polite way to leech on top of the media attention (I mean we are all doing it), maybe throw in some spicy bits with references to some GH issues to stir Twitter up but remain polite and respectful. This was just rude for no good reason, esp. because Jarred CLEARLY was only very respectful towards ZSF.
Personally, I won't run Bun in prod, but I no longer write any Zig either. Good old node for me, and good old C, Rust and C++ too.
Why must every language have every feature, mass applicability, and be intended to be the language-to-end-all-languages? Growth or marketshare is not the only valuable aim.
If you want mutable data structures, I wouldn't point you to Haskell.
I think people are overfocusing on the wrong thing.
Bun is slop. Let's not pretend it is not. It went from 600k lines of zig to almost a million of rust, for a wrapper around a js engine. It might be useful slop, but it is still slop.
It's understandable to have mixed feelings about bun as the creator of the language.
You spend 10 years of your time making a language, and one of the most prominent projects that uses it does it in a nasty and sloppy way. You try to help, but your advice gets ignored.
You make a whole language about improving software quality, only to be associated with a project that doesn't care about it.
For once I do appreciate that somebody is willing to have the guts to say what they think. The bun rust rewrite article said no words about the tradeoffs of moving to Rust (compilation times?), and I agree with the false dichotomy presented. How do we know that most bun bugs were not created because of slop / AI usage / stubbornness?
I desperately hope that the Andrew Kelley style of software engineering will survive all of this; that users will continue to value quality and not be content with slop. This, of course, presumes that products built fully by agents will produce sub-par quality in the future. If they will be able to manage to glue all of this slop together without the project collapsing in on itself, none of this will matter. I just hope that this isn't the future of the industry.
I recall an instance where he mocked the project as "Microslop" on his blog and then quietly edited the post later. That aside, the earlier rewrite from TypeScript to Go involved efforts to minimize regressions as much as possible—such as announcements to users and the community, and a phased, one-on-one migration. This project, however, is a different story. It becomes from a buggy product to an entire slop product.
> I recall an instance where he mocked the project as "Microslop" on his blog and then quietly edited the post later.
Sorry, this is wrong. Not relating Bun project.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260204011603/https://ziglang.o...
> Microslop Windows provides a large ABI surface area for doing things in the kernel. However, not all ABIs are created equally. As Casey Muratori points out in his lecture, The Only Unbreakable Law, the organizational structure of software development teams has a direct impact on the structure of the software they produce.
While there are some interesting nuggets of context in there we could have done without the passive aggressive tone and personal attacks.
> We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. > Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
Ufff, the creator of zig saying that the biggest zig project is slop was definitly not on my bingo card.
Its sad to see that on of the biggest projects was more or less badly written zig code. On that note, I wonder which big project have good zig code?
Ghostty, TigerBeatle. The other two poster children.
Is the bun rewrite actually done? There's no tag for the release, and as it stands robobun has almost 1.3k open PRs on the repo: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pulls/robobun
It doesn't look done.
And it looks like work on the rewrite began in early may: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/commit/46d3bc29f270fa881dd573...
So... its more like a 2 month rewrite that is definitely not done yet????
From the rewrite to Rust article:
> Bun v1.3.14 was the last version of Bun written in Zig. Bun v1.4.0 will be the first version of Bun written in Rust. It's available in canary now.
It's also been shipping with Claude Code since June 17th.
It's been shipping in the company that's success is partly contingent on it shipping? But there's no release? Curious.
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> he could have easily achieved a solid living via crowdfunding, even for San Francisco standards.
That sounds completely surreal. Is Bun really used that much?
That is a 100% on point analysis, there was a lot of hype around Bun since the beginning when it was an invite only project. Arguably that same interest is what got Jarred VC funding in the first place.
Note that usage and public interest are not the same quantity, people also care about the potential of a project.
A project getting hype does not mean that same project could sustain itself through crowdfunding.
What a petty article. Does not reflect well on the Zig community at all.
Nice writing by Andrew IMO, please don’t be discouraged by people criticizing the writing style, it is firmly on the lighter side of what I would expect. It even feels a bit passive aggressive to me so it would be better have a more direct and harsh writing style maybe?
As a side note, never trust someone saying they use fuzz testing just because they say so. Odds are they don’t even understand what fuzz testing is.
And it was glaringly obvious they don’t know how to program in this context from their complaints around memory safety. The issue should never that the code randomly segfaults, it should only be it maybe exploitable in an adversarial scenario.
For all comments that will write something like “I can’t believe how rude this is”:
No one really care about this, there are real problems in life, please get a grip, you are just being annoying
Related:
Rewriting Bun in Rust
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837877
The video he links to at the end is such a strong message, somehow able to celebrate the promise of AI while not afraid to point out whats complicated, or even fraught there. AI is, truly, a reflection of ourselves, our own hangups, prejudice, desire. Its both what draws us to it, but also inspires us to be critical. Thanks for the prescient reminder there OP.
Calling someone "stinky manager" is not ad hominem. It's a way of saying that he's managerial skills are very poor. Does it relate to the argument? Very much so. Changing a bread factory into a slop factory makes Jarred a stinky manager and even a "sloppy" one
Never heard of Bun or Jarred before today I enjoyed his blog post about the migration to rust, it is an impressive feat if real ! I didnt see anything bad about Zig in the post, on the contrary it shows respect and that big projects can be done in Zig
Next, I read Andrew's post, and the thing I see is: Jarred looks like an achiever, Andrew more like a butthurt childish whiner I also can see why Jarred made the migration, it is not only technical, and it was a great call IMHO
I read the post and roughly summarized it as:
1.It felt uncomfortable that Bun was presented as a representative example of Zig. From the internal Zig perspective, it looked more like a bad example of how to use Zig.
2.It felt uncomfortable that they spoke as if Rust prevents things that could actually be handled by Zig's style guide.
3.I(OP,andrewkelly) don't think badly of Jarred as a person, but after signing a contract with VC, the management side has been poor.
4.The Bun documentation looked like marketing.
5.Bad contributions driven by AI came through indirect promotion of Bun, which attracted interest from people after it was acquired by Antropic.
I understand that it's burdensome to see Bun as Zig's representative success story, and I get the wish not to see Rust rewrites through a lens of language superiority. But on the flip side, I'm not sure I would have ever learned about Zig if not for Bun.
While the criticism is valid, I also understand Bun's position. After all, Antropic's acquisition of Bun was ultimately about showing that even a 'new language' can be used effectively with AI, and that's precisely where the friction arose.
I think the refusal to accept AI from a purely human programmer perspective is a matter of personal values, and I find the Zig team admirable on a human level. (Though I'm an active proponent of AI, so my view differs.)
Both sides have valid points, but sometimes I wish someone would turn the emotional and political dynamics of open source into a novel. I think it would be fascinating
> 2.It felt uncomfortable that they spoke as if Rust prevents things that could actually be handled by Zig's style guide.
"Handled by Zig's style guide" ends up as "Don't make mistakes" which is entirely useless advice. C++ spent years trying to make out that this constitutes useful guidance before gradually accepting that people aren't in fact going to stop making mistakes, you need to provide a better language and tools.
I agree with some points as well. In fact, the OP argues that sufficient engineering attention can solve the problem, but I think that's only theoretical in reality, it's difficult. It's like C programmers claiming that undefined behavior is manageable.
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*Ben
Sorry. Sometimes I can't remember the English spelling. Thanks for the correction. i've fixed it
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Not accepting a PR because it was purely written by AI is like saying PRs will only be accepted if the developer used a standing desk for more than 75% of the time during the code's creation. In the end, as long as the code is not shit, who cares how the sausage was made!
I find it hard to believe you actually think those two things are similar or equivalent. I've heard many bad analogies in my life but this is so funny that it makes me think you're being sarcastic.
We have the potential to get along really well, but this isn't really the right comment thread for that, haha
I for one appreciate a public figure with a wildly opposed mindset to the Silicon Valley/VC-Funded/Ultrascaling/whatever crowd.
The pushback is warranted and on point, especially the technical points. It has taken a suspicious amount of time to produce the fabled blog post which I don't think states almost any new information beyond what Jarred has already shared on twitter. The one (and very interesting) exception is the theoretical price of the rewrite via the API pricing.
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This is 2017 Biden vs Trump for people who know who Godbolt is
Disclaimer: I'm bullish on Rust. And I think LLMs are overhyped, and kind of overhated.
Honestly, I think it would have been better if he had done the smart thing and ignored the noise around Bun's Zig -> Rust, and focused on code.
If he was willing to ride the coattails of Zig being hyped by Bun, then he should have taken the hit when Zig and Bun parted ways.
Hell, if he is that happy that they are leaving, he shouldn't have written that he is happy. Just smile and wave...
So now Jarred wrote a very matter-of-fact post about migrating Bun to Rust, and Andrew Kelley wrote a ranty blog about Jarred sucking at Zig, and being glad he's gone.
Andrew sounds whiney. His reasoning seems sound until he begins to attribute Bun for an uptick in drive-by slop contributions.
The man may need some time to decompress, away from social media.
>We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. Abuse of assertions. Most of all, recklessly speeding past feature after feature with very little time taken for reflection and elimination of bugs and technical debt.
I'd like to know what the poor code quality in Bun looks like. Does anybody have concrete examples?
I notice something more interesting. This post shows Andrew to not only personally criticise Ben but also clearly shows an ideological stance against AI. I can see it from multiple angles - refusing AI PR's, refusing Anthropic's donation and multiple other things.
Either this ideology helps Zig position itself as a hand crafted language. Or this ideology is self defeating.
Such a refreshing take after all the marketing nonsense from Bun. Zig is a glimmer of hope in a world of slop.
So bun went from bad Zig code to absolute slop Rust code?
Yes, but at least now its memory safe.
Allegedly.
While I agree that the Zig code in Bun could be better, and that the Silicon Valley pressure to move fast and break things prevented a lot of suggested improvements, this feels like the same argument as people who write C or C++ where people think they wouldn’t make mistakes.
For example this section
> We've been trying to warn you about your comptime abuse for years.
You could replace comptime with templates in C++ and it would be the same story. People will abuse features you put in the language. Is C++ a good language that people are just using wrong? According to Bjarne Stroustrup yes, and the C++ core guidelines fixes those issues, but a lot of people seem to disagree. Don't believe me here is an interview where he talks about memory safety in C++? ^1
> Ryan: One thing that I think C++ is uh infamous for is kind of like memory safety issues or kind of foot guns that exist there.
> Bjarne: I'm so tired of that. Um I haven't had those problems for years. Um, and somebody did a a study of the obvious problems with buffer overflows and um people hacking in using that kind of stuff and uh almost all of the uh these cases when people writing C style code or in C and uh Herb Server has a a talk with with actual numbers and they they are quite significant. It's it's sort of that kind of problems more than 90% are for people that don't write modern C++. They they use raw pointers to pass things around without um the number of elements. No fat pointers, no spans. um you you have them in C++. You can use them. You can use uh vectors. We have hardened libraries. Everybody has hardened libraries that that does the runtime checking. Uh Apple has it. Google has it. Microsoft has it. It's just not standard till now. C++ 26 has a hardened option that are standard. uh and the work I'm doing on profiles will give you a way of guaranteeing that you don't do the stupid things. Um so anyway, uh fundamentally theoretically the problem was solved many years ago and people just do what they've always done and get the problems they've always had. And uh that makes me sad and uh it's one of the things that makes me work on uh coding guidelines and on enforced profiles and on education. I mean education is one way to solve the problem. Is there a way to get the compiler to just prevent people from doing all those risky things? And is that enabled by default in modern C++ today? No, but it should be. I'm proposing that for C++ 29. Uh the simpler versions of that should have been in in in uh C++ 26, but there are still a lot of people even in the C++ standards committee that are very devoted to uh their old code and their old ways of doing things. Um there's people who says you should only standardize what is common in industry. But when the bugs are common in industry, you should do something else.
Is this going to be Zig's answers to real issues that people have in the real world? I'd argue that's not good enough for a modern systems programming language.
> We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. Abuse of assertions. Most of all, recklessly speeding past feature after feature with very little time taken for reflection and elimination of bugs and technical debt.
The vast majority of software is written by businesses, who have to cater to the lowest common denominator in their code base, including slop programmers, pre or post llm. They are not incentivized to go slower. We will never see a mass adoption of Tiger Style programming (though I would be happy to be proven wrong). That is the reality of what we need programming languages to help with in 2026. I've never met a professional programmer that has not seen or said the same thing about a code base that they've worked on.
New programming languages need to contend with that reality if they want to be adopted en masse. If not they are doomed to not be adopted (which is okay I've created many programming languages that are just for me). But if a programming language in never adopted then the supposed benefits or improvements of the language never trickle down to us the users of the software, so they just remain interesting ideas (which again is okay).
> This attention could have been harnessed in a few different ways. For example, he could have easily achieved a solid living via crowdfunding, even for San Francisco standards.
Andrew kelley runs a tight ship, and his foundation does not need a lot of money to keep going, but he has talked about how working on all the organizational transparency is not his favorite part of the project, and I can see why a lot of young programmers wouldn’t want to go that way.
Now let me be clear I actually like Zig, and have promoted it on Hacker News before, and written some code myself. I actual uses Zigcc in one of my projects because it makes my life easier. I genuinely love the tooling of Zig, and I feel like the language respects my time. I want the language to succeed
I also think that Andrew Kelley is a principled man with good engineering sense, and has turned down opportunities that would have made him a lot more money, were he to violate his own principles. That is admirable, and he has demonstrated it on so many occasions that it is currently not a question to me. What I would like to see, and what Andrew has said Zig focuses is how Zig can improve program correctness even more, without requiring me, or my coworkers to be a 10x programmer
1. https://youtu.be/U46fJ2bJ-co?t=2780
I agree with some of your points, but I think the Safe C++ project will be difficult because it would require breaking backward compatibility with existing projects. Honestly, I also don't agree with the claim that 'if you manage it well, data races and memory safety errors won't happen.' However, C++ already has so many projects built on it that breaking backward compatibility would cause serious problems. I think it might be better to just switch to a different language altogether.
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This is quite an interesting read from Andrew's perspective. But one line tells me everything I needed to know.
> The blog post is expertly written. It's almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article.
Even Andrew knew that this was going to be Anthropic's marketing opportunity for AI to rewrite Bun from Zig into Rust. This post from Jarred says it all. [0] If you have access to hundreds of billions worth of resources (infinite tokens and compute), they don't care what others think and some relationships are just cheap to discard.
Like I said before in [1] and [2], Bun (now Anthropic) does not care about you. They did this to market the capabilities of their AI models and this rewrite was an example of that in broad daylight. Even if Zig allowed AI generated contributions, this move was going to happen anyway.
I cannot believe that many commenters in [0] at the time did not see that this rewrite was eventually going to happen.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073893
Yeah 100% they were going to do this anyways.
The post reads like someone who is quite upset but trying to maintain professionalism. The mask slips throughout.
The points seem valid, however, and I will likely steer clear of Bun.
> The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it.
Why don't YOU spend the engineering resources to add RAII and a borrow checker instead of blaming your users?