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by quantumleaper 29 days ago
A bit off topic, but see how Anthropic publicity stunts went from "Claude C Compiler" with 100K LOC to the recent Bun Rust rewrite with 1M LOC (10x!) in just 3 months.

I get that it's "novel" creation vs porting, but given that they reported that the C compiler cost them $20k in API costs, the Bun rewrite must be at least $200k, maybe even closer to a million. Pure madness.
2 comments
gmueckl 29 days ago
Asking an LLM tp change programming language of an implementation is completely different from asking it to code from spec. It's orders of magnitude simpler in practice. I converted some 60kloc of Java to C++ and it works. There were some issues where the Java implementation used runtime reflection because that needs creative workarounds and not all of the C++ translations worked on the first try. And that was my first serious attempt at a task with an LLM. I could likely do better now. An important task simplification here is that a well designed codebase can be converted in small pieces and then joined back together. So the total amount of code converted becomes an irrelevant metric.
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pron 29 days ago
Yes, the task is very different, but also it will be months to a year until we know the results of the bun experiment.
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quantumleaper 29 days ago
I don't know how it could fail - Bun loses popularity among devs? Is it an objective metric? From what I understand, Node.js remains dominant across the industry as a whole, with Deno and Bun mostly used by startups.

Anthropic can always fire the Opus/Mythos token machine gun on any problem (bugs, features, security) to ensure PR success, and there would be plenty of AI-sphere startups already drinking the kool-aid that would consider the whole vibe-coding thing to Bun's benefit.

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pron 29 days ago
> Anthropic can always fire the Opus/Mythos token machine gun on any problem (bugs, features, security) to ensure PR success,

Can they, though? They tried and failed to do it in their C compiler experiment. The experimenter wrote: "I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality."

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eudamoniac 29 days ago
It could fail due to maintenance burden. There is a lot of code now that no one wrote.
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t_mahmood 29 days ago
Are we assuming, all tests pass == software done?

Do Firefox not have tests? Then how was there over 200 CVEs found?

Are we going to be comfortable running a piece of software that has 1M lines, and who knows how many zero-days will be in it.

Yes, sure they are going to use LLM to find the CVE's, and so will the hackers. You need a day or two to fix the security issue, a hacker just need to put it in use.

And good luck debugging a million line code base.

1M LOC == already failed.

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