Comment by embedding-shape

>Literally who cares what language a JS toolset is written in?

Maybe you're being coy by asking a rhetorical question you already know the answer to but I'll answer as if you asked sincerely...

There are 2 different groups interacting with software products:

(1) end-users : this is where the "Who cares what language it's written in?!?" is usually applicable. E.g. The finance guys using MS Excel don't care whether it's written in assembly, BASIC, or C Language.

(2) code contributors and/or programming language enthusiasts who see other projects as "validation" of the whatever language they've invested in: these people definitely care.

For all the decades that computer languages have been debated, Group (2) will always discuss projects language choices. E.g. reddit.com switching from Lisp to Python, the Linux kernel fiercely debating future Rust contributions , the Typescript compiler switching from Javascript to Go, Bun switching from Zig to Rust, etc.

People try to lecture others in Group 2 about "don't make a programming language your identity" ... but people are human and they can't look at all the above language choices as totally detached observers. They like to talk about it!

If one is a Zig coder that contributed to the previous Bun Zig codebase, we can't expect them to be neutral observers.

> who cares what language a JS toolset is written in?

Anthropic, apparently, not the least because they blanket-closed all issues submitted before the rewrite. If the language were irrelevant, it shouldn’t matter for the existing unfixed issues.

> It’s made absolutely no negative difference, as we’ve seen in the real world in the last 60 days since the merge.

This is even more interesting given that prewar Bun was not a well respected code base. This matters if the code was bad, were the tests bad / not comprehensive as well? If so, the translation to rust whose sole / primary target was test-passing will have a fair amount of undocumented bugs in it.

> poster child for Zig programming language actually being the prime example of How Not To Write Zig Code

https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...

The crux is:

> What is the governance structure for Bun by the way? Couldn't find any documents/explanations about how it's supposed to work. I'm guessing it's essentially just "Anthropic decides what gets done and accepted" today?

And this is a valid question. You are not "defending reality" by refusing to listen to it.

In summary and based solely on my understanding:

- Jared misled people about the intentions of the migration. It's not the worst thing in the world, but it's certainly worthy of criticism.

- Jared has commented before about locking out human contributors from open source projects. Whether he was making a larger point is irrelevant as his comment stands on its own.

- Other Bun contributors, past and future, outside of those employed by Anthropic, did not and likely will not have equal access to the model Jared used for the rewrite.

Jared, working in the public Bun repository, used tooling not available to his community to experiment with a signficant migration. He dismissed all concerns and told people it's just a bit of fun, and that it shouldn't be taken seriously. Most of the controversy would have been avoided were the experiment done in private.

None of this is a big scandal but questions about the project are entirely justified.

> that this made bun worse in any measurable way

Issues on GitHub was mass closed claiming zig is no longer relevant without fixing the real issues.

this whole AI era has put the topic of "do we believe actual reality, or what we hoped/assumed/continue to insist would be reality" front and center. Every discussion is like this these days.

>It’s made absolutely no negative difference, as we’ve seen in the real world in the last 60 days since the merge.

The rust code is not yet in a stable release, and CC only switched to it in the latest version, so there's not been 60 days of widespread battle testing yet, so i don't see how we could possibly say it will have no negative difference. It hasn't, because nobody is using it yet. It still might.

>Literally who cares what language a JS toolset is written in?

I don't care what language it's in, but i do care how it is written and maintained. I'm not going to trust my projects to a runtime that was written by an LLM in two weeks with practically no human review

The outrage was more how the rewrite was communicated and defended, which was objectively poor.

Except that it hasn’t yet hit the real world, the live release is still 1.13.4, the last Zig version. Anthropic does not operate in the real world.

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I agree, it's unfortunate the headlines seem to have become 'rewritten in Rust' (not a bad thing) and not 'vibecoded in a week without review' (a bad thing).

> bun was vibe coded by a single dude without any open source community involvement.

I think even this is largely beside the point. The acquisition of any project by Big Capital (whether tech or VC) is usually a killing blow.

Is the idea that a code base reset makes something stop being open source? Or that the number of people doing the reset matters?

I don't see why either of those would be true. The project isn't dead just because it's in a different language now, and for liveness purposes it doesn't matter how it got to that different language.

That's just like your opinion...? More power to Jared (and anyone else) if they can "vibe code" useful projects like bun.

I think the Zig people are really just worried that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language before it has even reached 1.0 because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it.

If this were true the very small but active community of Zig contributors could just fork it and you could all return to the happy times of not using Bun anyway.

Bun became a thing because it provided some specific benefit to js ecosystem. Zig enabled the rapid development. The people who contributed were definitely helpful but they can still choose to help or not and new people will step up too

You can install it now we with bun upgrade —-canary it something along those lines.

It's a canary releasing directly from main: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun

We have run it in production for a month: https://www.prisma.io/blog/bun-rust-rewrite-prisma-compute

And GP is full of shit as the main branch is the v1.4.0. it is not "released" yet as it is not finished. It is available as canary version.

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> As an open source - community driven project? Have you looked at the repo on github?

FOSS as in FOSS - Free and Open Source Software. Has nothing to do with if it's community driven or not, I'm strictly talking about FOSS.

Why is that even a thing to object to? You're talking as if you placed stock in the bizarre idea that Anthropic would close source the project and start charging for it.

Stay your pitchforks.

It may be available to us, in the form of a git checkout of their public repository.

It's true that we don't know exactly which, and whether or not there are any other changes added on, but that is the case for every single release of Claude Code that has used bun.

That is also true of the rest of their codebase, no?

Moving the goalposts?

An interesting tidbit is that large parts of the original Bun source code was a line-by-line port of esbuild from Go to Zig (mentioned here: https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust), tbh this lowered my respect for the project a bit (a line-by-line port simply isn't as interesting as original work), and it might also explain the subpar Zig code quality (a line-by-line port from Go to Zig simply won't result in idiomatic Zig). It also might explain why porting from Zig to Rust was done 'on a whim', the actual source code (and the idea of 'original work') never seemed to be all that important to the author (and I wouldn't be surprised if the project does more language-hopping in the future heh).

I don't think the GP had anything to do with the language change itself. More that it marks a clear point of Anthropic taking ownership and governance of the project in a less open direction.

> I'm concerned that the complete rewrite in an entirely different language is not a sound technical decision…

Even if this was a terrible technical decision, it is a good, maybe even unavoidable, business decision. And I don’t think moving to Rust was a bad technical decision at all, given Zig is unstable and constantly changing, and that it’s not memory safe, which is a big problem for something like a JS runtime!

The reason it’s a necessary business decision is that Bun is owned by an AI company and Zig has a policy to not accept AI assisted contributions, making it impossible for Anthropic to contribute to a language that is still evolving rapidly, not to mention the bad marketing of using a language that basically is hostile to your product.

A lot of hypotheticals, conjecture, speculation, personal feels devoid of any facts. That somehow kills the project. ok!

of course they also gave away their own claim to be the copyright owner, but that's neither here nor there ; )

> taking that into production with barely any announcement is what kills off the interest to me.

Did Bun v1.4.0 release weeks ago and I missed it? I would call a formal release the point that it goes "into production", and I think dogfooding it via Claude Code is yet another form of testing Bun-in-Rust before the latter goes to casual users.

Which community specifically though? The overwhelming “user” community would be web developers and people writing JS/TS, right? Not zig/rust developers.

It's like a couple of languages I know where there's still one real owner, and there's no real review, and PRs are unlikely to be merged, even with review: They might be open source, but it's more a source visible thing, because you are never going to get a change in, and the language will change directions at the creator's lone whim. The best you can get at times is "I didn't like your PR, so I implemented the feature you tried to add completely different". Typical community killers.

The language an application is authored in does not matter to me, as a user. I care that it is widely-used (safety in numbers), that it works, and that it is fast.

It's cool that the Zig project exists, but I'm unlikely to ever use Zig so that’s sort of orthogonal to my interests.

The whole point of the outrage was that 1.4 was merged into main. Publicly. So I’m not sure what you mean.

Everything is in the open: PR #30412

> Update: The Rust version has been released as Bun canary - running bun upgrade --canary will install this release.)

The Claude Code release notes. Not the Bun release notes: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/releases/tag/v2.1....

> Upgraded the bundled Bun runtime to 1.4

(Though that doesn't clarify that this is the Rust rewrite)