[veidr]

I can understand where you are coming from, but I myself am coming from a quite different place. I'm a long-time Deno fan, and to me Bun was less interesting because a.) it seemed like a much-less-ambitious Deno, and b.) I don't want to learn Zig, so I wasn't likely to try to hack on Bun itself, even just recreationally.

But, I warmed up to Bun over the last couple years almost against my own will — trying to maintain a pretty large body of TypeScript code in a runtime-agnostic way (including even Node, since 24.2). I don't want to make any specific TypeScript runtime a requirement for my TypeScript code, unless there are really good reasons to do so.

But Bun (like Deno) kept providing those reasons. Postgres, SQLite, S3, websockets, local secrets (Keychain/wallet), bundling, compilation, killer speed. So I (somewhat grudgingly) started using Bun more, and even made it a requirement for some of my projects (albeit, in ways I could walk back later if needed).

Today, I have a bunch of API servers and frontend app servers which are bun build --compile --bytecode single executables ,that can run and be deployed virtually anywhere.

I've been very happy with it so far. But also, I don’t think that the way I am doing it is super-common, and now that they are doing this, uh... extremely ambitious LLM port, I am perfectly positioned to regret all of my decisions around Bun if this port ends up sucking.

So I'm a little nervous, but... what if it doesn't suck? That would be cool, because a.) they will have shown something interesting about what is possible with LLMs (albeit if you are rounds-to-a-trillion-dollars valuation frontier AI lab, lol, but still). And b.) going forward, Bun will be developed in Rust. We all have our own preferences, obviously, but to me, that's a win.

And if it does suck, though — that's super interesting too! Will be annoying to me to re-architect my Bun-specific shit to Deno, but for the world at large (and me, too) that's still interesting information!

Because Bun is perfectly positioned to do a huge LLM-powered port. They are one of the premier TS/JS runtimes, it's obviously and insane marketing pillar for the AI lab that bought them, they have unfathomable resources and access to the cutting-edge models that all of us don't get to play with yet, and for all intents and purposes, they have unlimited money to do this.

So if they can't do it — which will be really obvious, I think, if true — then it really just isn't possible yet, and all the naysayers were right.

[coldtea]

>and to me Bun was less interesting because a.) it seemed like a much-less-ambitious Deno

I don't know, I've followed Deno, and it appeared to me an incredibly low ambition from the get go.

[veidr]

lol — what you're saying doesn't make sense to me, but I'm sure it makes sense to somebody

What I was specifically referring to is Deno (originally) trying to fix the (glaring, fundamental) problems that Node imposes on the world, vs just do them faster.

[coldtea]

Yes, but "fixing some fundamental Node problems" is a low bar, hardly the high mark of ambition now, was it?

And to offer a counter example, something like Dart appeared much more ambitious to me.

[brokencode]

I guess it depends on how you define ambition. If you are talking about in an absolute sense, yeah of course, the Dart project had to build a whole language, VM, and ecosystem. That's way more ambitious than Deno.

Though if you look relative to the team size and resources going into it, a project like Deno can still be considered ambitious. Creating an alternative ecosystem to nodejs is a large undertaking.

[veidr]

OK. But without changing programming laguages, "fix some fundamental Node problems" vs "don't fix those problems, just run them faster, and maybe inline the most popular dependencies"...

Surely we can agree that one of those positions is relatively less ambitious?

[pjmlp]

Well it remains to be proven how they can make a business out of fixing nodejs fundamental problems.

[veidr]

I think the Anthropic acquisition means that Bun isn't in that business anymore. Bun is still fixing fundamental Node problems, but that's no longer the business.

The business value the Bun team needed to deliver (to make the acquisition pay out) might very well be this controversial, but nevertheless spectacular, 6-day Zig→Rust port.

But beyond that, now Bun is just tooling used internally at Anthropic, which also happens to be open-source.

[egorfine]

> what if it doesn't suck? > And if it does suck

Why not both? How about that: perfectly fine for Anthropic but suck for everyone else.

[veidr]

well to me that would still count as "it sucks"

but sure anthropic might not agree

[subarctic]

Is there much value in it being written in rust if it's all AI slop?

[veidr]

Well "slop" is doing a lot of work there. If it's all incomprehensible garbage-code that no human can understand? Then... yeah very marginal value to me, in terms of hacking on it.

However, I think if it turns out that that's the case, then their port will fail in two ways (to paraphrase Hemingway): gradually, and then suddenly.

I don't think this port can be a success unless they end up — on the other side of it, not necessarily immediately — with maintainable Rust code.

[txdv]

if they succeed nothing will change for you

[gpm]

If they succeed the software will be more reliable with less memory issues that are very likely significant security issues at least some of the time.

When we've seen linux having a new significant exploit every other day now thanks to LLMs being better at weaponizing memory bugs this seems significant.