[embedding-shape]

You're not alone in voicing this, another (now dead) comment did it earlier too with a bit more of an emotional response (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48134229).

Still, do you folks never do something to see how you feel about something, then chose to go one way or another? I'm not sure why it's so hard to see that it was an overreaction at the time, because it was an experiment, then at one point it stopped being an experiment and now they've chosen to actually run with it?

Is this not a common occurrence for other people? Personally I change my mind all the time, especially based on new evidence, which usually experiments like this surface, I'm not sure I understand the whole "You said X some days ago" outrage that seems to cause people's reaction here.

[tasuki]

Yes sure it's ok to change your mind. But don't you think the people Jarred accused of "overreacting" in retrospect didn't?

[embedding-shape]

No, what we knew then is still what was known then. Today is different, and seemingly they've committed to the rewrite, so now it makes sense that people have strong feelings about it, as it's no longer just an experiment.

[grayhatter]

> so now it makes sense that people have strong feelings about it, as it's no longer just an experiment.

It also makes sense to have strong feelings when you're able to pattern match well enough to predict something will happen despite others trying to convince you that your predictions are incorrect.

It's not overreacting when correctly predicting the future, just because others couldn't. In the same vein, the idea that "everyone out to get you" is not called paranoia when there are people actually out to get you. That's better called being observant.

Some of those who predicted correctly might also have overreacted, but I believe that the majority understood that to be a blanket statement about prediction as a whole vs any specific individual reaction.

[tasuki]

Maybe the people who "were overreacting" just happened to have more foresight than you and me? Perhaps they saw where this was heading, and that led to their "overreaction"?

[embedding-shape]

In what way? Foresight about what? It was an experiment before, regardless of people's reaction at the time doesn't make it less of an experiment back then. I feel like I'm misunderstanding this entire conversation right now.

[tasuki]

> It was an experiment before, regardless of people's reaction at the time doesn't make it less of an experiment back then. I feel like I'm misunderstanding this entire conversation right now.

Yes - I think I didn't explain my feelings well. But, now I understood them finally! So:

It was an experiment back then. Now, nine days and a million lines later, it suddenly isn't an experiment anymore? I understand there's a comprehensive test suite (yay!) but still... a million-line diff in nine days still sounds like an experiment to me.

[rcxdude]

The difference is an assumption of good faith, for the most part, and that is to some extent modulated by how reasonable people believe a large scale LLM and/or rust rewrite is a reasonable idea.

[wiseowise]

Why are you defending them so much, lol. It's no longer an underdog open source project fighting for survival, it's a freaking Anthropic subsidiary that has been bought for hundreds of millions of dollars.

[rcxdude]

Generally when people are doing this, it's not out of a desire to defend the party being attacked, but because they value some principle that they think is being violated in the attack. Most often this is just caring about what's actually true.

[serial_dev]

“Nobody could have seen this coming…”?

Well apparently a lot of people did. Maybe Jarred didn’t, maybe you didn’t, but most people correctly predicted what was coming.

[embedding-shape]

See what coming?! I really don't understand what's going on here. Correctly predicted what, that Bun was being rewritten into Rust? I'm not sure anyone doubted that, all the work they did was public???

What on earth is going on here?

[BoorishBears]

It's really simple.

9 days ago this is how the migration was described:

> I work on Bun and this is my branch

> This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.

> I’m curious to see what a working version of this looks, what it feels like, how it performs and if/how hard it’d be to get it to pass Bun’s test suite and be maintainable. I’d like to be able to compare a viable Rust version and a Zig version side by side.

9 days after that comment, the rewrite has been merged to master.

9 days after "this is my branch" "the code doesn't work" "I'm just curious" "high chance it's thrown out"... it's merged to master.

-

Some people saw the original as an attempt to downplay the importance of the branch in response to negative feedback, rather than accurately describing what the branch represented.

Those people essentially predicted that Bun's actions would shortly reflect much more conviction than was being let on.

Experiments graduate to production all the time, but given the timelines involved, their predictions were correct.

[antonvs]

> Those people essentially predicted that Bun's actions would shortly reflect much more conviction than was being let on.

Ironically these people are displaying great confidence in AI’s abilities.

If that’s the case, what are they objecting to exactly?

[famouswaffles]

Stop thinking about '9 days' like it means the same thing in an era where machines can generate thousands of lines of code in a few hours.

There is no way a human rewrite like this wouldn't be roughly at the same stage with a 9 day delta. In that case, some of these accusations would be reasonable to make. But that is not the case here.

[wiseowise]

> I'm not sure anyone doubted that, all the work they did was public???

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226

> This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.

[grayhatter]

> What on earth is going on here?

With the nearly complete PR with the port to rust, a number of people predicted that it was going to happen. They were assured it's unlikely to happen and then they were accused of overreacting over effectively nothing. When those same people who were already upset about the rewrite, learned that their predictions the same ones that were rudely dismissed, were in fact, correct, they became upset again; this time about being lied to.

Correct or not, it's reasonable to conclude they were lied to. Especially given they correctly predicted the future.

[famouswaffles]

>Correct or not, it's reasonable to conclude they were lied to.

No it's not. If we were 9 days away from a human written version of this experiment then yeah it would be reasonable to conclude they were lied to, because a human written version would progress so much slower and steadier that it's very unlikely you hadn't made up most of your mind a week before merge time.

But it's not human written. It's months, perhaps years of work compressed into a week, where the machine can go from 'nothing is working' to 'everything is working' in a few days. There is nothing reasonable about concluding you must have been lied to when such a delta in such a short time is possible. And if people fail to see that, then perhaps the initial assertions about an emotional meltdown were not so far off after all.

[antonvs]

> What on earth is going on here?

Irrational armchair quarterbacking driven by emotional reactions to change and perceived threats. It’s not worth worrying about this specific instance, but the overall trends could get messy. This is just a taste of that.

[hombre_fatal]

The top comment at that link points out how many of the sibling comments are delirious and emotional, kneejerk responding to the news rather than giving any sort of sober analysis.

That people were overreacting with emotional meltdowns (common in AI-related threads) is perfectly compatible with the branch making enough progress to get merged.

[wiseowise]

Anyone who disagrees with me is having an emotional meltdown and obviously they're delirious AI-haters.

[Muromec]

I'm not in a cult, you are in a cult and delusional!

[BoorishBears]

This seems dishonest.

I'm reading through the top comments next to his and don't see that. You can always find delirious and emotional takes, but those didn't dominate the discussion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48017005

> [...] Time will tell how this will turn out. Would be nice if the Bun maintainers could give some clarification about what they’re doing here, and why they’re doing this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48017358

Compares this to Go runtime's C to Go migration

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48017309

Link to Github diff view

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48017505

> I wonder if a successful, albeit slower, approach would be to walk the git commit history in lockstep, applying the behavioral intent behind each commit. If they did this, I would be interested in knowing if they were able to skip certain bug fix commits because the Rust implementation sidestepped the problem.

[weird-eye-issue]

Who cares? Go see a therapist

[wiseowise]

It's a high profile open source project. While Bun/Jarred don't owe anything to anyone, nobody should be surprised when decisions like these result in strong backlash.

Imagine if Guido or Linus said a couple of days ago that they're just experimenting and then submitted and merged complete machine-assisted rewrite of CPython or Linux in Rust.

[buu700]

This actually happened to me a couple months ago. Started a Rust rewrite of a project as an experiment, then a few weeks later it was presented to the team and promoted to mainline.

Although in that case the language change was almost incidental — the rewrite was very much not a straight 1:1 port, but more of a substantive architectural overhaul and longstanding tech debt cleanup; Rust was just one of many tools and design decisions that helped get the best possible end result. There were also various reasons it made sense to attempt a rewrite within that particular window of time.

The upshot is we've ended up with a substantially stronger QA posture, a much higher-quality and more maintainable codebase, and an extremely positive audit report by a group that was brought in to review the project. There were some early kinks to work out, but the longer we've lived in this version of code the more it's proven itself to be a stronger foundation than its predecessor.

Of course, Bun is its own thing and all circumstances are unique. I have no idea how that rewrite was approached, whether it was the right decision, or how it will ultimately prove itself. Just saying the shift from "experiment" to "official new direction" is normal and credible, and that I'd give it some time to see how it handles contact with reality before passing judgement. If it's truly a disaster, nothing's stopping them from reversing course and backporting any new changes to the old Zig codebase.