Not a single person on the Bun team nor Anthropic has yet done anything egregious to market this as anything but a swap to a more memory-safe language with better compiler guarantees.
Thus far most of the buzz and marketing has been entirely negative from people who are against AI.
My take is that most of the buzz is also tied to recent negative opinions of Anthropic themselves due to some of their recent decisions.
The best kind of marketing is when you don’t need to say it aloud by yourself. Yet, this is constantly in HN front page. Maybe engineered or not but marketing regardless.
rooted in a long 30+ year reality. you can engineer the greatest, most secure, most accessible, most ____ thing but if it doesn’t sell those amazeballs engineers will be talking to their recruiters…
That's fine but I'll say as a human, that makes you a pretty crappy one. Only caring about monetary rewards is pathetic frankly, luckily the vast majority of humans don't agree with this sentiment and continue pushing the boundaries and our imaginations onward.
> Thus far most of the buzz and marketing has been entirely negative from people who are against AI.
To me it seems like quite a lot of it is also by people who spent years maintaining a codebase just to have the metaphorical rug be pulled out from under their feet, and feel that a migration like this might be kind of disrespectful (how many of the people that have gotten good at Zig and know the codebase will find the switch over to Rust easy)? Or in some cases, that it's just bad engineering - instead of releasing it alongside the main project and focusing on gradually getting parity over months, it just got merged into the main branch.
On a more practical note, however - if you get acquired by a company that gives you almost unlimited usage of tools that might help you migrate to a language, that 3 years down the line will lead to a better codebase than today, then I guess it also makes sense to take that chance.
And of course, you get a lot of people who are opposed to AI on principle, as you said.
I mean, the phrase "Zig to Rust port of Bun" makes little sense even to many professional developers. They may know Rust, might have heard of Zig, very likely don't know what Bun is.
So the fact that this gets any attention at all says something.
Just like how they did the rewrite. It is not longer a small OSS team trying to survive in the world, it's a corporate entity with unlimited access to Anthropic resources. All the doomsayers who were prophesying that Bun will become sellout were right.
Thus far most of the buzz and marketing has been entirely negative from people who are against AI.
My take is that most of the buzz is also tied to recent negative opinions of Anthropic themselves due to some of their recent decisions.