Comment by pu_pe
5 hours ago
I am fascinated by the discourse around this Bun rewrite. I read a lot of drama and personal accusations, there are pieces like this one trying to extract clues, and it seems everyone has a deeper ideological concern behind whatever they are trying to say. For this article, it seems to be skepticism towards AI and how successful it can be at replacing programmers. Other takes, like the one from the Zig maintainer, were also along those lines but more about the open source ethics and the future of that in a LLM world.
I am mostly bullish on AI capabilities, so from my perspective I don't see why we should be skeptical that frontier LLMs guided by experienced devs can translate whole libraries like that. Good follow-up questions would be how expensive it currently is to do so, and whether we will see people branching into all-in on AI versus no-AI camps as happened in this case.
> experienced devs
No one on their team had Rust experience
You see this response because the port of Bun from Zig to Rust does not have anything to teach us about Zig, Rust or porting between languages with LLMs.
There are so many non-quantifiable properties to evaluate of the 'before' and 'after' codebases. Choices and preferences to be had about languages, language porting in general, and LLM coding.
After all that, pretend we could have a clear convincing distillation of the port and want to go apply the lessons learned. If someone doesn't get LLM porting results as good as Bun did, or it cost them substantially more in tokens, then they're "holding it wrong." If someone is underwhelmed by Bun's results, then it was just a proof of concept and the models have gotten so much better in the last 6 months anyway you can't compare.