[padjo]

It's very odd how quickly people fall back on emotional claims to attack this. Like we're engineers, if you can point at concrete problems with this rewrite I'd love to hear them. Obviously Jared is going to give the positive case, saying that he's doing that doesn't prove the rewrite is a bad idea. You need to point at objective problems, not your vague sense of unease. As it stands, by all available measures, this appears to have been a massive success, which is absolutely remarkable.

[lunar_mycroft]

There were/are absolutely plenty of real problems with the resulting code pointed out. Running Miri trivially found soundness issues, `SAFETY` comments that demonstrate that the model in question fundamentally doesn't understand/simulate understanding how unsafe rust works [0], etc.

[0] https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/fc865b398e51de8a95ddde4b...

[insanitybit]

These seem really easy to address. Any SAFETY comment that relies on the caller is something you can trivially find and fix.

[lunar_mycroft]

First, we're talking about a massive rewrite of complex software project which no one has fully reviewed and which the people most familiar with the code base (the bun maintainers) aren't even qualified to do so. As such, the issues people have found are mostly surface level.

But second, you're right, this is an easy thing to search for (especially with LLMs). And yet, the example I linked has been there since may, surviving multiple rounds of review. From this, we can draw a few conclusions: 1) claude (including apparently mythos/fable) fundamentally doesn't "understand" how unsafe rust works, and 2) no one on the bun team is aware that they need to tell it to fix this (if they're even aware that this isn't allowed in the first place).

The reason such trivial defects in a codebase are a red flag isn't so much those specific issues themselves, it's what they reveal about the authors. If you find a lot of obvious defects in some code, it's very likely that there are also many more subtle harder to detect issues as well.

[insanitybit]

I think that's an interesting point that the models wrote SAFETY comments that are so obviously not what SAFETY comments are for. A SAFETY comment can never be about callers, that's the whole point of `unsafe`.

[endospore]

Look a few more till you find absolutely bs SAFETY comments marked on immediate UBs. They are everywhere.

[endospore]

Well the rewrite has newly introduced many immediate and critical safety (as in Rust sense) problems. It's clear and obvious if you read the code knowing the basic rules of unsafe Rust. And don't be surprised if it doesn't appear as obvious to you or Jarred or Claude, because not knowing they don't know is the exact reason why they failed at it.

And for the emotional aspect. I'm working as an R&D engineer and one of my recently assigned experiments is to evaluate replacing workers with LLMs, quality software with slops. Every bit of exaggeration they make is making my coworkers lose jobs and I'll be no exception. The entirety of me consists of reasons going against this kind of marketing compaign.

[bluGill]

We also need to ask if the better is because of Rust, or just because the old was a mess and the language was good otherwise.

[padjo]

I don't think "better" really had to be proved. The same but aligned with your org strategy is perfectly acceptable given these sorts of technology choices are often driven by exogenous and wooly factors like licensing, your confidence in the future direction of the technology, or the ability to hire staff (or the ability for LLMs to work with the technology!)

[afry1]

Technology does not exist in a vacuum, nor does anything that is engineered. It's not this abstract stuff detached from the world.

PEOPLE make stuff, people use stuff, and people are ultimately the ones who are going to pick and choose which stuff gets made, used, adapted, enhanced, and carried into the future.

AI is an inherently anti-social, anti-human technology, and this rewrite is the perfect example of that.

Assessed from the perspective of "technology in a vacuum", of course. it's a success. He did the thing that transformed the thing from one kind of stuff to another kind of stuff. It still does all the things it did before, and in many cases with better stats than it did before.

Assessed from the human angle, and especially the angle of Bun as a community, I would bet money that this rewrite -- executed by nobody for nobody, built and maintained by machines, maintainable only by machines -- has killed the entire project.

Maintainable only by machines, because anybody with any knowledge, experience, or investment into Bun as a platform, or who contributed patches themselves, or whoever had a question about how it works and went "Hmm, I'm gonna go into the codebase and take a look at how that happens", they all got slapped in the face and summarily kicked out of the tent with the rewrite.

[Ygg2]

> AI is an inherently anti-social, anti-human technology, and this rewrite is the perfect example of that.

Not really. LLMs are a tool, and they do possess some interesting properties, but they are, in essence, a very surprising auto-complete.

No, what sucks is the AI companies marketing them as if they are The Holy Grail. And people are assuming that somehow LLM -> AGI -> ASI, even though there isn't really a causal link to be had, and acting like it's The Singularity.

I don't blame autocomplete for fucking up RAM, labor and god knows what else. I blame the idiots (at OpenAI and Anthropic) buying all RAM stocks and pretending this shit is any way good for anyone.

[darkwater]

If you think like this - and you are most probably right IMO as well - then you should somehow share GP feelings, because LLMs are made by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and Bun was bought by Anthropic and ported to Rust by Anthropic.

TBH in hindsight it seems that the Bun acquisition was also for the PR stunt they just did with the Rust porting.

[Ygg2]

I don't because I think the GP is blaming the tech, not the actual culprit - a bit like blaming the invention of fridges for people hiding the body. LLMs can be made and hosted independently of OpenAI and Anthropic.

> TBH in hindsight it seems that the Bun acquisition was also for the PR stunt they just did with the Rust porting.

The events went roughly like this:

- Anthropic used Bun. So they acquired it.

- Bun made some LLM derived patches for Zig. They were rejected due to Zig no-LLM stance.

- Bun couldn't get patches in, so they switched to Rust.

Was it a PR stunt, an attempt to pressure Zig maintainers into changing AI stance, or just doing the fastest thing possible? It's difficult to tell. I'm inclined to believe the last option.

As easy as it is to blame Bun for a PR stunt, it's also possible that you can't really associate with someone who rallies against your employer/owner.

[N1H1L]

> AI is an inherently anti-social, anti-human technology, and this rewrite is the perfect example of that.

This is a very weird issue to be mad about, and can be extended to multiple technologies - if you think about it, from computers to cellphones.