Comment by stymaar
8 days ago
Rust as a language is irrelevant to this discussion, the problem is that bun was vibe coded by a single dude without any open source community involvement. “bun the open source project” is basically dead at that point: don't expect any of the zig enthusiasts who had their code being forcibly rewritten in a language they don't like to follow Jared.
“bun the JavaScript runtime ” is not dead though.
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).
"Vibecoded" is not an accurate description of what actually happened. LLMs are extremely good at porting code from one language to another while preserving semantics. Which is why how everything turned out so well was not very surprising.
"Preserving semantics" by casting pointers to aliasing refs in Rust, ignoring lints and errors in the process.
Can't help laughing at this point.
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Rust as a language is not relevant, but the Rust community still helped to popularize the idea that trashing a community by a rewrite is ok if it serves some "higher goal". This rewrite is just a striking example why this is problematic.
Surely a lot of review has happened in the last two months?
Reviewing is meaningless while they are still keeping the 10433 (sorry it has become 10503 since last week) unsafe blocks, most unsound and none encapsulated.
Any review would get to the simple conclusion that this should not be released before all the obvious bads are sorted out.
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> 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.
I think the point is that an “open source project” is more than just the code and license, it’s also the community that builds and maintains it.
A fast rewrite of Bun in Rust has effectively alienated most of the people in the Bun community, so in that sense the “open source project” has died. It’s no longer a community project, it’s just become a personal project again.
Just so everyone know, Bun is and has always been owned by a YC funded org with full time employees. The overwhelming majority of commits came from them.
A reset is very different from not being open source any more. If losing most of the community would mark a project dead in open source terms, then every new project would be dead on arrival. And that would just be silly.
That's just like your opinion...? More power to Jared (and anyone else) if they can "vibe code" useful projects like bun.