Comment by cyber1
2 days ago
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.
Not really. It seems like the Rust rewrite blog post triggered this. Which, even though I don’t agree with the tone, seems to be valid criticism.
[citation needed]
Here[0] are other reasons besides AI
- [0] https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-s-zig-fork-got-4x-faster-compilatio...
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Citation that this was the reason or citation that he said that?
For the latter: https://youtu.be/iqddnwKF8HQ?si=cvU8Fh3ah7ZCxg3M
From 26:38
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.
The borrow checker really isn't that bad. It isn't like they were porting from something with GC. They were already having to think about these things anyway. Even then opus seems to have no difficulty going between c# and rust while respecting the idioms of both. No unsafe needed. Zig should be even easier except the lack of a training corpus for whatever frankenversion of zig that bun was using.
All that unsafe does in these cases is enable the "unsafe super-powers" which the compiler can't check, thus shifting the responsibility onto the author. But for example if you've got some code which doesn't borrow check, and you just sprinkle unsafe keywords on it, now you've got code which still doesn't borrow check and diagnostics telling that this unsafe keyword was futile and you should remove that.
I haven't reviewed this code, but the percentages described don't sound like they'd need a huge architectural overhaul to use much less unsafe, it might take more actual human effort than they want though.
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Even if you “rely on countless unsafe blocks”, unsafe is additive, it gives access to additional APIs which are not checked. It does not disable affine types, the borrow checker, or send/sync traits. Unless the entire codebase is unsafe (e.g. fresh out of c2rust) it’s very hard to not have more guarantees.
And because unsafe is generally highly local or localizable reasoning (conventionally backed by safety justifications) it really is quite reasonable to go plugging at it, or task an AI within that.
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If you are writing in C-like codebase and aren't tracking lifetimes and ownership at least as well as a borrow checker you're opening yourself to CVEs.
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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.
As was mentioned countless times here on HN, the fork didn't get merged not because of any no-AI policy but because the Zig maintainers considered it to be of poor quality and were already working on more comprehensive improvements to the compiler which would bring the same (and more) benefits, but without the downsides and quality issues of the fork.
zig doesn't accept ai written code
How is Bun codebase connected to Zig codebase?
Rumor has it there is a HN submission on the frontpage right now about that very thing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843352
You can't do "redesigning the existing Zig code in a way that eliminates not only the current bugs but also prevents similar ones from happening in the future" without actually changing Zig itself.
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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]
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.