Comment by klausa
8 hours ago
Look, I understand being skeptical of the whole process; the discourse about this has been extremely tiring.
But at some point if “moving one of the biggest actively maintained and used codebases to it without anyone noticing” is dismissed as “it doesn’t mean all that much”, then we’ve lost the plot a little bit somewhere.
It's the equivalent of porting Unreal Engine 5 to another language and then using it exclusively to run a 2D Tetris clone. Let's wait for the next Bun release when more real-world code is hammering it before declaring victory.
(also, fwiw, a manual rewrite would be under the same scrunity and suffer from the same skepticism, at least when obviously rushed).
If you ported UE5 to, idfk, Malbolge and ran Tetris on it and someone would dismiss it as “not impressive”, I would think they lost the plot too!
LLMs are very impressive. Five years ago, the idea that we'd have software that you could ask - in English, mind you! - to rewrite an entire server side JS runtime and you'd get something which even kind of worked was squarely in the realm of science fiction. But the question isn't "is this impressive?", but rather "should the results of such a rewrite be relied upon?" (and specific to this thread, "is the fact that a use case which only touches a small subset of the features of said result appears to no be completely broken good evidence it should be?")
If you could successfully write Tetris in Malbolge, I would call that impressive indeed. Just writing Hello World was a major effort IIRC. The nature of the malbolge interpreter makes it more of a cryptography exercise than a coding one.
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You just compared Rust to Malbolge :)
"I ported .NET framework to x86 bare metal. Here's hello world as proof."
"I ported .NET Framework to x86 bare metal. Here's proof using Hello World."
A human doing it is impressive. A human performing many computations a computer could do would be impressive. I don't get impressed when a computer computes a number. A language machine translating is just... doing what a language machine does? When a language machine starts doing something other than translation, I will be impressed. If computers starting singing without any human intervention, for example, would be incredible! C3PO knows many languages—he may know Rust and Zig. C3PO translating from Zig to Rust isn't surprising to me. Sounds par the course for a robot who knows languages.
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You have absolutely no way to know this though.
Like, come on already.
Is it though? What’s your source for that data?
Claude Code client isn't one of the biggest actively maintained and used codebases. If it is one of the biggest, that's showing AI's tendency to waste its own tokens and your money.
Claude Code is 150k lines of Javascript that doesn't work particularly well. 150k isn't nearly "one of the biggest", even when filtering for actively maintained.
Why is porting a program from one language to another seen as some great achievement? We had f2c in the 1990s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2c
This isn't a valid comparison. f2c is a compiler and the output isn't intended to be human readable.
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This is akin to saying "we replaced the tires on the car and the average user didn't notice". If the entire car was replaced, then maybe we get a bit more excited.
However if "replacing small sections of code" is heralded as "the most amazing achievement in software development" then we've all lost the plot a little bit somewhere.
It makes sense both ways, no?
The reality is, of course, most people aren't going to notice. If the functionality and performance is 1:1 why would they? Is it impressive? A bit, but not how you're positioning it. People seem to forget LLMs are good at what they've learned from training data. And the LLM is good at compressing time. The only notable thing about these types of marketing spins is that a rewrite was accomplished in a small time frame that was hard to pull off before LLMs. The actual act of the move is less so.
Did the codebase improve? Is it more performant? I've seen nothing to really stake those claims with any objectiveness. Lastly: what was gained?