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by vmsp 27 days ago
That wasn't a value judgment on the acquisition. I was just pointing out that it made the project more sustainable.
3 comments

That's a yes and no. Venture funded companies like Anthropic have a history of low follow through with peripheral projects (like Bun is for them). Of course they do - their responsibility is ultimately primarily to their investors - not to Bun. So the risk now is that Anthropic will can Bun whenever they just lose interest or feel it's just a drain that's not contributing directly to their bottom line.

Node.js itself did have trouble finding a corporate home that was interested in providing good support for the project, and that's how we got the oi.js fork of Node, which luckily led to Node being transitioned to a foundation and the projects merged. This whole history is what made me so surprised that Ryan of all people would attempt another js runtime (Deno) project as a corporate project.

And it's the reason I'm staying away from both Bun and Node. I can't afford platform risk like this. I need my startup to be built on a project that has a more reliable future trajectory, which is what you get with a proper open source project (emphasis on project) that you get with Node. Node is stable and still getting features, but most importantly it's not going away.

Bun is not peripheral, it's what Claude Code runs on.
I see how this might seem like it would make Bun important to Anthropic, but there are just so many examples of companies losing interest in the technology that their product "runs on". It's just infrastructure to them. To the C-suite, infrastructure is fungible.
It really doesn't. You think Anthropic will still be in business in 10 years? If they are, it's not likely they'll be in the same shape.
Only if you think Anthropic is a sustainable business per se which remains to be seen.