Comment by muglug
6 hours ago
A major rewrite in another language is also unusual for this project.
It took TypeScript a year to go from announcing tsgo to releasing TypeScript 7.0. That work was done in parallel; here the work is being done serially — and it’s likely to take much less than a year for a new release.
> It took TypeScript a year to go from announcing tsgo to releasing TypeScript 7.0.
These are not comparable at all. The bun "rewrite" really is more of a translation of a software that is mainly dogfooded, created with an at best loose regard for a wider ecosystem.
TypeScript 7.0. by comparison is not just a translation from one language to another. It's a true rewrite that at the same time has to consider a massive existing ecosystem (which needs to catch up first or you risk fragmenting it). Plus you might as well consider 6.x part of the effort, since that was the stepping-stone.
Also where bun really is just a runtime implemented with a bunch of glue code plus supporting tooling, TypeScript is much more complex. Change one part of TypeScript and you can get cascading issues somewhere else in the compiler easily. Change something in Bun and you'll likely just break some discrete part.
It's funny, but a large reason for why Go was chosen was explicitly because it has semantics close to TypeScript and that made it automatable:
https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/411#d...
> But this wasn't a compiler redesign, and the TypeScript to Go move was far more automatable and more one-to-one in its mapping.
So basically the opposite of what you're saying.
> The bun "rewrite" really is more of a translation of a software that is mainly dogfooded, created with an at best loose regard for a wider ecosystem.
This seems self-contradictory. If it's just a translation, doesn't that mean it remains fully compatible with that wider ecosystem? All the existing APIs retain identical behavior given the preexisting comprehensive test suite that had to go 100% green after all.
> This seems self-contradictory.
It's not.
Passing an existing test suite just moves the optimistic lower bound to incidental compatibility, it doesn't move it to intentional - "regard" implies you gave it thought.
Plus, it's not just about code: it's also about giving the ecosystem a migration path. Dumping 500k LOC on people and discontinuing development of the zig version effective immediately (there hasn't been a release since and the zig tree is only a reference - the build script is removed afaik) is the opposite of what TypeScript did. If you broke someone's N-API module because of a regression not caught by your suite they're now between a rock and a hard place.
The good news is that there's nobody there to notice. The bun userbase is miniscule* compared to TypeScript's.
* negligible? irrelevant? laughably small? I'm struggling to find an adjective that does the difference justice.
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TypeScript 7.0 was literally a line by line translation. With essential features necessary for adoption still like a year off.
Yes, its because Anthropic took over and wanted to showcase their LLM capabilities by porting such a complex codebas.
Everyone’s point is “they have everything to gain by lying about being more done then they are” and “the claims seem at least a bit full of shit”.