It’s made absolutely no negative difference, as we’ve seen in the real world in the last 60 days since the merge.
I feel weird having to defend reality; reality being that it was merged nearly 2 months ago and tons of people have had their pitchforks out without a shred of actual evidence that this made bun worse in any measurable way. But they still insist it was a mistake.
I’ve never met Jared or the bun team but I don’t understand all the personal attacks, I just feel the need to correct the facts. Literally who cares what language a JS toolset is written in?
It’s not like they ported JavaScriptCore (the actual JS runtime) to rust even. All that stuff is largely untouched.
>Literally who cares what language a JS toolset is written in?
Maybe you're being coy by asking a rhetorical question you already know the answer to but I'll answer as if you asked sincerely...
There are 2 different groups interacting with software products:
(1) end-users : this is where the "Who cares what language it's written in?!?" is usually applicable. E.g. The finance guys using MS Excel don't care whether it's written in assembly, BASIC, or C Language.
(2) code contributors and/or programming language enthusiasts who see other projects as "validation" of the whatever language they've invested in: these people definitely care.
For all the decades that computer languages have been debated, Group (2) will always discuss projects language choices. E.g. reddit.com switching from Lisp to Python, the Linux kernel fiercely debating future Rust contributions , the Typescript compiler switching from Javascript to Go, Bun switching from Zig to Rust, etc.
People try to lecture others in Group 2 about "don't make a programming language your identity" ... but people are human and they can't look at all the above language choices as totally detached observers. They like to talk about it!
If one is a Zig coder that contributed to the previous Bun Zig codebase, we can't expect them to be neutral observers.
I think you're missing group 3, which is the "assume bad faith and/or bad outcome from any possible change to anything, and especially changes to open source projects that can be interpreted as exogenous, e.g. from an acquirer, and especially if that acquirer is a gigantic commercial entity."
There are not nearly enough disenfranchised Bun-on-Zig contributors to make a dent in this conversation. There are lots of Group 3s in every similar convo, for any combination of technology, project, and acquirer you can name.
I think most of the naysayers are in group 3 because there’s a lot of anger but never a single link to a blog post or analysis done by anyone to demonstrate a regression. not one. There are some that analyzed the quality of the initial rust code and use of unsafe but Claude has been chewing through those as I understand.
Personally I chose not to disclose my findings in public to avoid this kind of outcome. Having a good laugh with others is not as important as keeping the result of this experiment undisturbed.
This also eliminates the chance of another round of marketing of LLM ability based on actual human contributions and I suggest everyone who is able to analyze the code to do the same - so that they cannot misattribute our ability to LLMs.
Afaik, under current US law (Thaler v. Perlmutter 2025^), "the Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being".
With regards to AI-generated code, this means the copyrightability (at all, not with regard to who owns it) turns on whether or not a human was substantially involved in its creation.
Existing decisions require evidence of pretty heavy and continued human guidance to qualify.+
To wit, autonomous agent created code (prompt -> machine churns for hours -> output) is explicitly not eligible for copyright.
Functionally, this is a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, it means anything coded with autonomous agents by Meta, Google, et al. can be legally reused if it leaks (because no one could hold copyright on it).
On the other hand, it leaves copy-left open source licenses in a weird place. If you convert open source (even MIT/BSD-style) code into something else with an autonomous coding agent... the result has no copyright (nor can ever in the US).
In this instance, Bun was MIT-licensed, no? Then it was shoved mostly-autonomously through an LLM for the port.
Now Bun-Rust is technically still MIT licensed, but if push came to shove it seems like US law's current position is that Bun-Rust would now have no copyright license (because the manner in which it was developed renders it ineligible for copyright).
That's on the copyright side.
On the infringing usage side (i.e. whether you were entitled to shove a copyrighted work into a coding agent to produce something)... that's still TBD.
Couldn't it be argued that Bun-Rust is still MIT licensed, because the old implementation was "in the first instance" authored by a human? All the machine did was translate it.
I think it's the "infringing usage" question that is more interesting. If the LLM trained on GPL-derived code, what does that mean for the end result?
> who cares what language a JS toolset is written in?
Anthropic, apparently, not the least because they blanket-closed all issues submitted before the rewrite. If the language were irrelevant, it shouldn’t matter for the existing unfixed issues.
> blanket-closed all issues submitted before the rewrite
You'll need a citation for that. While I'm still not sure whether Claude Code's issue tracker is worth much (Anthropic doesn't seem to engage with individual issues a while lot), it still has 5k+ open issues ranging back to March 2025. Bun also still has all of its Zig-timeline issues, all 5k+ of them. So what's this about?
imagine being the leadership of the one of most valuable US private companies in the world. then you have to make something called a "pull request" that gets "reviewed" by someone named "Jarred" to make improvements to your stuff. do you see how that is untenable?
the language is relevant for political not technical reasons. you could say, blanket closing the Issues, getting rid of this thing called Jarred from your stack, etc., is really an attack on the GitHub and the GitHub Agitator Lifestyles, which is why so many commenters on Hacker News actually care.
> It’s made absolutely no negative difference, as we’ve seen in the real world in the last 60 days since the merge.
This is even more interesting given that prewar Bun was not a well respected code base. This matters if the code was bad, were the tests bad / not comprehensive as well? If so, the translation to rust whose sole / primary target was test-passing will have a fair amount of undocumented bugs in it.
> poster child for Zig programming language actually being the prime example of How Not To Write Zig Code
> What is the governance structure for Bun by the way? Couldn't find any documents/explanations about how it's supposed to work. I'm guessing it's essentially just "Anthropic decides what gets done and accepted" today?
And this is a valid question. You are not "defending reality" by refusing to listen to it.
In summary and based solely on my understanding:
- Jared misled people about the intentions of the migration. It's not the worst thing in the world, but it's certainly worthy of criticism.
- Jared has commented before about locking out human contributors from open source projects. Whether he was making a larger point is irrelevant as his comment stands on its own.
- Other Bun contributors, past and future, outside of those employed by Anthropic, did not and likely will not have equal access to the model Jared used for the rewrite.
Jared, working in the public Bun repository, used tooling not available to his community to experiment with a signficant migration. He dismissed all concerns and told people it's just a bit of fun, and that it shouldn't be taken seriously. Most of the controversy would have been avoided were the experiment done in private.
None of this is a big scandal but questions about the project are entirely justified.
Whole classes of bugs WERE fixed by moving to rust. wouldn’t that result in mass closures of classes of bugs that were no longer relevant in rust? What would you prefer?
I would prefer they confirm before closing. It's AI / bot anyway. Instead it's just mass keyword zig = close. The bug can still exist post-port. None of it got "fact-checked".
In fact a lot of "feature requests" like npm compatibility related or missing specs etc ALL also got closed for being "zig" because reproduction and suggested solution were of course zig.
Whole classes of bugs are fixed by safe rust. This is not safe rust. As a line-by-line translation with unsafe forced anywhere necessary to make it compile, this should result in no classes of bugs fixed by moving to rust.
this whole AI era has put the topic of "do we believe actual reality, or what we hoped/assumed/continue to insist would be reality" front and center. Every discussion is like this these days.
>It’s made absolutely no negative difference, as we’ve seen in the real world in the last 60 days since the merge.
The rust code is not yet in a stable release, and CC only switched to it in the latest version, so there's not been 60 days of widespread battle testing yet, so i don't see how we could possibly say it will have no negative difference. It hasn't, because nobody is using it yet. It still might.
>Literally who cares what language a JS toolset is written in?
I don't care what language it's in, but i do care how it is written and maintained. I'm not going to trust my projects to a runtime that was written by an LLM in two weeks with practically no human review
Which was completely bonkers -- it happened completely in the open, people were just outraged that something like this happens without asking them and not on a schedule they perceive as adequate. Most of them haven't really grasped what was happening and why. Many still don't.
It wasn't out in the open. It was never announced or discussed ahead of time. It was just done because the company who purchased Bun wanted it done, and they only communicated it was happening once they started.
I don't consider the following comment to be good, honest, and open communication:
> There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.
... and a few days later he decided that the code wouldn't get thrown out. That doesn't make the comment itself dishonest, he didn't have a crystal ball.
You can absolutely argue that the rewrite was not communicated clearly once they committed to it, but I don't think the comment you linked to there stands as evidence of poor communication at the time it was written.
Rust as a language is irrelevant to this discussion, the problem is that bun was vibe coded by a single dude without any open source community involvement. “bun the open source project” is basically dead at that point: don't expect any of the zig enthusiasts who had their code being forcibly rewritten in a language they don't like to follow Jared.
I agree, it's unfortunate the headlines seem to have become 'rewritten in Rust' (not a bad thing) and not 'vibecoded in a week without review' (a bad thing).
"Vibecoded" is not an accurate description of what actually happened. LLMs are extremely good at porting code from one language to another while preserving semantics. Which is why how everything turned out so well was not very surprising.
The Zig one uses raw pointers. These are bad and get out of hand quickly but at least don't have constraints like "you must never have two &mut on the same value". You may refer to c2rust to see how "semantics preserving transformation" without new UBs looks like.
Sorry, I did. And I did an internal sharing with respect to the blog post, on topics of how to (and not to) do software migration, how (not) to deal with unknown unknowns etc. We have several ongoing software (automated) migration projects so I did rather extensive research around it.
I do regret that I've also read the code though, otherwise I'd probably live a little happier with ignorance right now. Sadly as they don't know they don't know about the issues, there's no indication of those in the two public materials they have released.
Rust as a language is not relevant, but the Rust community still helped to popularize the idea that trashing a community by a rewrite is ok if it serves some "higher goal". This rewrite is just a striking example why this is problematic.
Reviewing is meaningless while they are still keeping the 10433 (sorry it has become 10503 since last week) unsafe blocks, most unsound and none encapsulated.
Any review would get to the simple conclusion that this should not be released before all the obvious bads are sorted out.
My conclusion was formed in my two months long tracking of the repo activities. They have done absolutely nothing in that front. (Well, to be precise they tried to fix exactly one thing that was pointed out but that's it)
> must interface with C code that has no safe interface
Yeah so the sane first step is to create encapsulated, safe interface for them, especially in a project like this. Deno for instance have ~0.2x as many unsafes.
And mind you if you haven't read the code, the vast majority of unsafe blocks in bun are for raw pointer access to local (Rust) objects because their ownership was a mess both before and after the rewrite. Also funnily enough a lot of the access patterns are wrong (in the Rust sense), leading to hundreds of new undefined behaviors.
> be honest and reasonable
Well, well. Talking about dishonest and unreasonable behavior, why is bun releasing a new version before solving any of those glaring issues? I'd remind you the current new version is not an improvement compared to the previous one, both in terms of correctness and maintainability.
Is the idea that a code base reset makes something stop being open source? Or that the number of people doing the reset matters?
I don't see why either of those would be true. The project isn't dead just because it's in a different language now, and for liveness purposes it doesn't matter how it got to that different language.
I think the point is that an “open source project” is more than just the code and license, it’s also the community that builds and maintains it.
A fast rewrite of Bun in Rust has effectively alienated most of the people in the Bun community, so in that sense the “open source project” has died. It’s no longer a community project, it’s just become a personal project again.
Just so everyone know, Bun is and has always been owned by a YC funded org with full time employees. The overwhelming majority of commits came from them.
A reset is very different from not being open source any more. If losing most of the community would mark a project dead in open source terms, then every new project would be dead on arrival. And that would just be silly.
I am impartial on the matter, but I think one of the reasons Bun became a thing in the first place was because of Zig attracted a small but very active developer community. Switching from Zig to Rust effectively alienates that community.
I think the Zig people are really just worried that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language before it has even reached 1.0 because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it.
You, by your own admission, haven't even written a single line of Zig despite having ~31 Zig projects on GitHub. I don't think your knowledge of the language is to be trusted in almost any capacity. This might seem harsh but I don't trust someone who's experience with a language amounts to slopping out 30+ repositories and not even engaging with the language normally.
By my own admission I wrote ~100K loc in zig-head. Having a background in linux kernel development of all things I can tell you that Zig is so much better than C or Rust, that I think linux kernel rush to rust is misguided.
I haven't even stated whether I agree with the opinion that Zig is worth it, in fact I do think Zig is worth it for a large set of problems and I wrote Zig for years, I am stating simply that I would never trust anyone who's self-admitting that they don't even write the language they're arguing for when it comes to opinions on whether it's good or not. It's not really about whether Zig is good, it's about someone who doesn't even write the language and doesn't even know it, not having a valuable opinion on it.
I guess that since you haven't built the car you're driving, your opinions on it are null and void as well.
Anyone who actually believes that I can't have ANY sound opinion on Zig after 31 projects building with it should get their head examined for brain tumors. I mean, it's not like I have to deal with all the positive and negative effects of things written in it. It's not like I've had to solve problems in it that emerged when the LLM didn't do things correctly (and yes, I can tell when this is so, and not just when things are buggy). And it's not like I don't know (by heart, not by LLM) at least 15 other languages that I can draw on (C, for example, for which I not only got an A in a class at Cornell once, but was in fact the person with the highest score in a class of ~150 people... A perfect score, in fact) to form valid opinions in combination with how I see Zig working.
So please take your baseless skepticism and baseless assumptions and shove them up your ass, dude. I have work to do, and I'm far more capable of it now than I was, thanks to the LLM boost.
Honestly, I wasn't harsh enough... Though I don't think I could write a better post showing how useless your opinion on things actually is than the one you wrote yourself.
And no, I don't think you can have any valuable opinions on Zig since you don't write it. In your analogy you're not even driving the car, but it doesn't surprise me that you can't figure that out.
Zig is a DOA language for other reasons though. The reason why Rust enthusiasts act so morally superior is because they are:
> Rob Pike, an unsafe guy, may insist that a small language and garbage collection are enough. But the typesafe visionary Grzegorz Wielbodłąński understands the deeper truth: every invalid state permitted by a compiler is a tiny act of civilizational sabotage.
There is no sense pretending anymore that languages with as many gotchas as C and Zig are "simple". Quite simply, they are not. The complexities lie in what's left unspoken, unaddressed, and of course undefined; failure to comprehend these completely can be catastrophic. Rust is so thoroughly and obviously the correct thing that using anything less correct should be taken as a sign of engineering incompetence.
> There is no sense pretending anymore that languages with as many gotchas as C and Zig are "simple". Quite simply, they are not. The complexities lie in what's left unspoken, unaddressed, and of course undefined; failure to comprehend these completely can be catastrophic.
This is where I’ve arrived too. After nearly 20 years of programming I feel done with leaving foot guns lying around. Languages that are full of them, but “fine” as long as you take extreme care are not interesting to me. I’ve started calling this “simple as long as you avoid all the foot guns” idea the sword juggling fallacy[0].
It’s too bad about Zig because it has many nice ideas, in particular allocators, that I hope Rust or some future language will adopt.
There are many things in life that are "fine" only when you take extreme care (knives, cars, industrial machinery,...). The thing is something like C has many usages and you can't just say "use Rust" and be done with it. Using Rust is not cost-free.
I'm not saying "never use C". The thing I dislike is the false dichotomy between "(Zig|C|Go) is simple unlike Rust, which is complex". A statement like that makes it sound like writing correct code in the former is easier when it's, in fact harder.
Yes they stopped caring after C89, Plan 9 C compiler was a mix of C89 with extensions.
Still they are the authors, and withdrawing from WG14, going their own direction with Alef, Limbo, and finally Go, kind of proves the point they considered C done for its original purpose.
The post you linked to seems to jump to conclusions, to say the least. For example:
> One probable outcome of an unsafe-language-dominant world is full Andrew communism, which is precisely what Andrew “Smelley” Kelley proposes: abolish ICE and replace the market economy with a globally distributed network of community-maintained allocators.
> Rather than a commercial product, software becomes a “public good,” ultimately provided by the Zig Software Foundation as manually managed digital infrastructure.
Calling him "smelley"? Really? Pulling in the political views of the founder of a language and claiming that they inform his language design as part of a grand conspiracy against Rust/capitalism? Where are they getting all of this? Free, open-source compilers and related tooling (both of which Rust and Zig have) are already public goods managed by global communities of mostly volunteers
> This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I have never met an unsafe-language advocate who could explain how this ecosystem is supposed to sustain itself without unpaid maintainers, ideological volunteers, subsidized infrastructure, and endless donations to compiler projects that still cannot protect users from basic memory errors.
How is Rust any different than Zig in this respect? Both are projects largely run by nonprofits relying on communities to promote, maintain, and improve them.
Frankly, that entire "Institute for Type Safe Memetic Research" seems like either an elaborate satire or an account run by genuinely insane people who think type and memory safety are paramount societal issues.
> run by genuinely insane people who think type and memory safety are paramount societal issues
So. Rust evangelists ? :)
But yes, it is wild that people can honestly quote such drivel as evidence of the language and its philosophy being superior.
Each time I try to evaluate Rust, I do so on its own merits. Going online I am rapidly convinced that I don’t want to be in the same room as a large chunk of its userbase. Statements start to sound a bit like that one time I was dragged into a pentecostal meeting.
If you saw the "Institute for Typesafe Memetic Research" and thought, "This is the den of Rust evangelists!" I don't want to break your illusion, because it's much funnier this way. Especially since there are like two people that like Rust on Twitter, and I'm one of them.
> Frankly, that entire "Institute for Type Safe Memetic Research" seems like either an elaborate satire or an account run by genuinely insane people who think type and memory safety are paramount societal issues.
You've been had. Your entire rant means the bait worked.
If this were true the very small but active community of Zig contributors could just fork it and you could all return to the happy times of not using Bun anyway.
Bun became a thing because it provided some specific benefit to js ecosystem. Zig enabled the rapid development. The people who contributed were definitely helpful but they can still choose to help or not and new people will step up too
Bun is just the js runtime tool. At worst, you'll get a crash. If you are worried about bun security while granting permissions to Claude code...your worries are placed in the wrong place.
Why is that even a thing to object to? You're talking as if you placed stock in the bizarre idea that Anthropic would close source the project and start charging for it.
I wouldn’t use language as strong as OPs but it is against the spirit of FOSS for a corporate owner to use a private prerelease version of their open source software.
I think it’s valid to object to. If 1.4 is good enough to be used by Claude, why not us?
So you wouldn't, for example, after doing a complete ground-up rewrite, perhaps spend a few months dogfooding it to work out the worst bugs before unleashing it upon the public, thus maximizing your initial velocity by minimizing the blast radius and support requests and triage during this phase?
Yeah. One single project that they control. Not thousands of other people's projects breaking, I'm sure with a ton of HN outcry over releasing "this pile of vibe coded slop" upon the poor populace.
You're running a closed source piece of software (claude code), running on an effectively closed source piece of software (bun), both of them updated daily by AI psychosis bros.
At this point, charging is the least of your issues.
It may be available to us, in the form of a git checkout of their public repository.
It's true that we don't know exactly which, and whether or not there are any other changes added on, but that is the case for every single release of Claude Code that has used bun.
It's probably not. I tried to extract the commit hash from the version of bun packaged in claude code. the commit hashes from previous versions resolve, whereas the commit hash for the current 1.4.0 isn't available.
from strings:
bun-v1.4.0
f6d0fcd24abd48061873c2f1a6fb2a67eee487b8
Upgraded.
Welcome to Bun's latest canary build!
This build does have a different way of identifying itself than earlier builds so it's possible this string isn't correct.
(In contrast, earlier builds that I have locally have commit IDs that can be found in the public repo). I don't think it's particularly damning for them to vendor a canary release, mind you.
> The most recent release of Bun on GitHub is currently v1.3.14 from May 12th, so that v1.4.0 version number in Claude supports them shipping a preview of a not-yet-released Bun version.
> And so, the FOSS project "Bun" silently dies
There’s no implication that it’s because of the switch to Rust.
> The objection isn’t to the language. It’s to Claude using a version of Bun that is not available to us.
I was responding to your GP comment. For weeks, it was uproar over the blanket AI move to Rust and now it’s this reason. That’s why I said the goalposts are being moved.
That seems illogical to me. We’re only allowed to have one objection to a project and once that’s used up we can’t air another? FWIW I don’t think people have forgotten the original objection either!
You can; it feels contrived and very social justice warrior/anti Anthropic (which on HN is in of itself almost a meme now). The main reason was because of the blanket AI move which I could understand.
> For weeks, it was uproar over the blanket AI move to Rust and now it’s this reason. That’s why I said the goalposts are being moved.
I'm just one person though, and have no problem with a move to language X, using tool Y, who cares?
For "goalpost are being moved" to be valid here, you have to be able to point to someone saying one thing at one point, then same person putting a different target later. You're folding a huge group of people into one person, when that's not really accurate to do.
An interesting tidbit is that large parts of the original Bun source code was a line-by-line port of esbuild from Go to Zig (mentioned here: https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust), tbh this lowered my respect for the project a bit (a line-by-line port simply isn't as interesting as original work), and it might also explain the subpar Zig code quality (a line-by-line port from Go to Zig simply won't result in idiomatic Zig). It also might explain why porting from Zig to Rust was done 'on a whim', the actual source code (and the idea of 'original work') never seemed to be all that important to the author (and I wouldn't be surprised if the project does more language-hopping in the future heh).
I read your link, written by Bun's author and totally get his thinking.
In the current world of cyber weaknesses everywhere, infrastructure must be solid and rust is a better choice than zig for something like bun.
In other words, bun is not a demo of zig programming that happens to do useful things. Bun does useful things, and must do them securely. That is its number one priority, language is secondary, inasmuch as it helps doing useful things securely.
I don't think you can claim your code is secure, or can claim anything at all about your code, if you haven't written the code and have no idea what's in there.
Rust protects against a rather small group of memory error, if and only if the unsafe sections are actually correct. And nobody knows if they are correct or not, plus there can be millions of logical errors that can be exploited.
See how many CVEs uutils has… quite a lot for a supposedly secure rewrite of GNU coreutils.
I don't think the GP had anything to do with the language change itself. More that it marks a clear point of Anthropic taking ownership and governance of the project in a less open direction.
> Why does changing to Rust kill the project? I don't understand the point here.
I'm concerned that the complete rewrite in an entirely different language is not a sound technical decision and instead is a ploy to shed copyright claims from past contributors.
Now, based on comments from this thread, the formerly FLOSS project is somehow granting special access to a corporation that apparently is invested in going way out of their way to push implementations that consume the complete rewrite before the world has access to it.
I for one won't be touching Bun. This doesn't pass the smell test. It feels like a bait-and-switch in progress.
> I'm concerned that the complete rewrite in an entirely different language is not a sound technical decision…
Even if this was a terrible technical decision, it is a good, maybe even unavoidable, business decision. And I don’t think moving to Rust was a bad technical decision at all, given Zig is unstable and constantly changing, and that it’s not memory safe, which is a big problem for something like a JS runtime!
The reason it’s a necessary business decision is that Bun is owned by an AI company and Zig has a policy to not accept AI assisted contributions, making it impossible for Anthropic to contribute to a language that is still evolving rapidly, not to mention the bad marketing of using a language that basically is hostile to your product.
Is there any precedent of rewriting a software, let alone in another language, retaining copyright by past contributors?
And this contribute to oss voluntarily but hold copyright and use it as some sort of leverage is bullshit, in my opinion. Don't contribute to someone else's project if your concern is copyright.
My personal feelings about the matter is that having an LLM rewrite the entire thing as an experiment and then just going with it a few weeks later kills any incentive for a community to build up around it. It's a clear signal that every basic aspect of the runtime can change on a whim.
I don't care about meh Zig being rewritten to bad Rust if it does the same thing, but taking what is presented as" look at this funny experiment I did" and then taking that into production with barely any announcement is what kills off the interest to me.
Bun has been a great ad for whatever LLM they were using but the cool factor is gone now, and that's really what set it apart from basic NodeJS in my mind.
> taking that into production with barely any announcement is what kills off the interest to me.
Did Bun v1.4.0 release weeks ago and I missed it? I would call a formal release the point that it goes "into production", and I think dogfooding it via Claude Code is yet another form of testing Bun-in-Rust before the latter goes to casual users.
Which community specifically though? The overwhelming “user” community would be web developers and people writing JS/TS, right? Not zig/rust developers.
There were very many open pull requests from the community that were all invalidated overnight for something that same community was assured was merely an experiment.
The normal process would be "hey, this experiment is going well, we've made this plan, come help us shake out the new codebase for the switchover in X time." None of that happened. There wasn't even an announcement, just a silent commit that trashed hard work from hundreds of community members.
None of that is needed. Nobody benefits from all that time wasting bureaucracy/corpo speak. Bun is quick to deliver new features and bug fixes. With this change, the hope is that'll only get faster.
All those PRs can be fed thru Claude and converted to rust and then manual polish can be added.
Bun is riddled with bugs. That's what moving fast and breaking things gets you. It gets you famously bad codebases that are nightmares to work with and slow you down over time as your sins catch up with you. Vibecoding is not enough.
Developer community. "Open source" historically implied that an interested developer might hack on the code and submit their changes. But if the entire code-base is rewritten by the maintainer every year, then there's no developer community.
It's like a couple of languages I know where there's still one real owner, and there's no real review, and PRs are unlikely to be merged, even with review: They might be open source, but it's more a source visible thing, because you are never going to get a change in, and the language will change directions at the creator's lone whim. The best you can get at times is "I didn't like your PR, so I implemented the feature you tried to add completely different". Typical community killers.
The language an application is authored in does not matter to me, as a user. I care that it is widely-used (safety in numbers), that it works, and that it is fast.
It's cool that the Zig project exists, but I'm unlikely to ever use Zig so that’s sort of orthogonal to my interests.
I don't care about the language, but pre-releases the community don't get access to but released (Anthropic) applications do have access to, feels a bit too on the nose after the acquisition.
Ok, go ask those people what they think then, I feel no outrage over a project switching language or merging whatever. But when once-semi-transparent projects become more opaque after an acquisition, I'm starting to readjust anything to the project I had in mind.
That PR is the rust rewrite. That's some time in the past now. As of this comment, there is no tagged 1.4 release. This is the present. Anthropic is using apparently a version of Bun that is not publicly available. This is orthogonal to it being Rust-based, as all Bun releases now will be.
That commit (and main) still purports to be 1.3.14, the version numbers haven't changed. Does that not still suggest Anthropic is using something else?
Come on, "not publicly available"? You know how git works right? Each Claude release probably has the HEAD of main compiled as "1.4.0" until there is a real official release.
I do know how git works and in my experience, while the version number sometimes doesn't get bumped until just before a release is tagged, the version number comes from the codebase. If they're building something that says 1.4.0, then they have a codebase that disagrees with ours.
Where is the previous version referred to in the codebase? I'm guessing that would be the place to look for changes.
If you can't find an update at that place in the codebase saying 1.4.0 you can ask where it is. It seems after doing that and not receiving an answer would be the appropriate time to start making the claims that people are throwing around.
I feel weird having to defend reality; reality being that it was merged nearly 2 months ago and tons of people have had their pitchforks out without a shred of actual evidence that this made bun worse in any measurable way. But they still insist it was a mistake.
I’ve never met Jared or the bun team but I don’t understand all the personal attacks, I just feel the need to correct the facts. Literally who cares what language a JS toolset is written in?
It’s not like they ported JavaScriptCore (the actual JS runtime) to rust even. All that stuff is largely untouched.