[Tesl]

I'm really out the loop here so maybe you can help answer me a question - why is HN unhappy about this rewrite? why are people writing here almost as if they feel betrayed by Bun being rewritten from Zig into Rust?

I genuinely don't get it. I've been following this Bun stuff a bit but I don't understand where the HN sentiment is coming from.

[ku5h]

Because in the software world, especially before 2022, ownership and stability have been valued. People like using things that do not randomly start breaking more often after every new release, and if things break, there is a human who knows exactly why it broke and what's the best way to fix it. Businesses would not want their losses to be attributed to an AI rewriting an entire codebase. AI owns nothing, not even the bugs which it produces. I would not want my SaaS to have downtime because a JavaScript runtime it depends on decided that they had to market their LLM by rewriting years of code recklessly.

People are not betrayed by a rewrite. They are betrayed by an LLM rewriting with minimal supervision fasttracked to a merge within 9 days of commencement.

To the contrary I do not understand how we have become so insensitive towards stability since the LLM era. Why is unbreakable code no longer the goal but a truckload of generated code is.

[ForHackernews]

> Businesses would not want their losses to be attributed to an AI rewriting an entire codebase. AI owns nothing, not even the bugs which it produces. I would not want my SaaS to have downtime because a JavaScript runtime it depends on decided that they had to market their LLM by rewriting years of code recklessly.

I don't know how else to say this but "Tough Shit"? Businesses are building their entire enterprise on the volunteer work donated by the free software community (or given away for free by some other company solving its own problems).

If you don't want 'your' SaaS to have downtime based on somebody else's whims, then fucking pay for your own developers (or your own AI) to build your SaaS platform in house. That's what IBM did in the 1970s, and nothing except market pressure is stopping you from doing it today.

I'm sorry for the vulgarity but this entitled attitude of businesses toward FREE SOFTWARE GIVEN TO THEM FOR NO MONEY is infuriating. If the electric company decided to give your company free power on windy days, would you then get angry that they installed a new model of turbine?

[Capricorn2481]

You should place this energy with something like ripgrep, not a company with huge funding that actually depends on people using their product. Their whole thing is convincing you to use Bun over Node.

[ForHackernews]

so...don't be convinced? Use Node if you prefer Node's governance style. Or Deno?

If they "depend" on people using their product, then surely all their paying customers will be happy to pay them whatever it costs to maintain the Zig-version-Bun that matters so dearly to them. They will see the folly of this rewrite and follow the money back to Zig.

[Capricorn2481]

> so...don't be convinced? Use Node if you prefer Node's governance style. Or Deno?

This is a thread full of people saying they aren't convinced and would prefer to use Node/Deno, and that was enough for you to call them entitled and shame them. Your comment doesn't really read like a FOSS advocate, it reads like you're running interference.

Whether you like it or not, Bun actually does care about carving out an audience, and this thread has a lot of useful feedback for them on how they run the project. When people are concerned about the stability of your runtime, if the best defense that can be mustered is "tough shit, it's free," that's damning in itself.

I also think you overestimate the Zig fandom. We could be talking about completely different languages and the response would be the same because it's not about the languages.

[ForHackernews]

I'm not a "FOSS advocate". Honestly, I'm a believer in free software and strong copyleft licenses. Companies should be made to give back to the commons they so cavalierly strip mine. You will never gain my sympathy whining about oh no won't someone think of the poor profitmaking enterprises that depend on your free gifts.

There is a way to obtain software that comes with guaranteed stability and support and it's called a paid contract.

[self_awareness]

> Because in the software world, especially before 2022, ownership and stability have been valued.

Stability in JS ecosystem was never valued.

[Capricorn2481]

The context nobody is mentioning is this came shortly after Bun forked Zig in the name of optimization, but then a Zig maintainer came out and basically said they (Bun) don't know what they're doing, or else they would have known that wasn't an effective optimization.

It outwardly seemed like they forked Zig for a flashy headline, were called out, then immediately started moving to Rust. This, combined with being bought by Anthropic, and plugging vibe coding the whole way, just gives the impression of random and chaotic technical decisions, which is not what people want in software their business depends on.

https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-s-zig-fork-got-4x-faster-compilatio...

[vickychijwani]

The unhappiness is primarily stemming from Bun’s ownership by Anthropic - HN sees this as Anthropic using an OSS project for reckless marketing stunts.

For the record I don’t believe it’s a stunt, it’s ridiculous to me - everyone’s just seeing what they want to see out of sheer hate for anything Anthropic does.

In any case if the rewrite is really as reckless as many in this thread claim, we will see Bun collapse in on itself with a 1M LOC codebase the core team doesn’t understand, or rollback to Zig. So we don’t need to have a flamewar over it, time will answer the question.

[itishappy]

My read is it's less the rewrite and more the messaging around the rewrite. Nine days between "you're over-reacting" and merge is surprising, to say the least. Sure will be interesting to see that blog post!

[noelsusman]

Vibe coding a Rust rewrite of a widely used tool is basically catnip for the HN crowd.

[zarzavat]

Not if you use that tool, then it's just scary.

[petcat]

I would think the Zig implementation with 500+ issues on Bun's GitHub tracker mentioning "segfault" would be even scarier.

[sqquima]

My read. If the code has a comprehensive feature test suite, a performance test suite (how long a function takes), and a linter with readability guidelines (e.g. cyclomatic complexity; no code duplication), and the LLM rewrite passes all three, then it should be fine. But I think that in the real world only the first one (functional tests) exists.

[jorisw]

Maybe Jarred can fill in here

[taejavu]

My read is that it just seems a bit reckless doing a full rewrite so quickly.

[sigmar]

posting my read (since it differs so much from the others')- there's a 'holy war' being waged by people that think LLMs shouldn't do full rewrites of software. There are various reasons people think this (think LLMs are parrots that make slop and are incapable of writing good code, have environmental concerns, or are angry that software licenses can be circumvented). I call it a 'holy war' because I think most see our current trajectory as a bit inevitable and have a strong urge to proselytize their views and chide maintainers that use LLMs in ways they don't like.

Very similar angry comments happened with the discussions of the Chardet rewrite, next.js/vinext, and JSONata/gnata if you want to look at this in context.