Indeed it's surprising, given the zig compiler famously causes all developers who use it to merge into a single organism with a combined nervous system.
It seems you misunderstand what happened to Bun: Anthropic has burned some investor money for a PR stunt -- our LLM can port this -- and also to punish Zig which dared to ban LLM contributions by taking away a significant project from the ecosystem. It worked, Rust didn't dare to enact a similar ban.
Anthropic tried hard to port using their LLMs but their models were not trained on enough zig corpus hence failed and they blamed it on Zig's principles
Please re-read my comment, I didn't mention anything about Rust. (IK they later switched to Rust. A year ago no LLMs were good at rust, similar to zig today, however its different story now)
I can see why that's the case, given that Rust is that much more popular than Zig. I wonder whether there's a difference between LLMs reading code and writing. If reading code is easier than writing it, then it makes sense that Claude was able to port from Zig to Rust with good results.
Aside from relative lack of examples, Zig also changes fundamentally from version to version.
LLMs are fundamentally pattern recognizers though. Bun is big with lots of repeated conventions - very straight forward to translate those conventions to others (zig to rust)
I’ve been building a toy game engine for learning and have had great success translating small C libs (collision detection and physics for instance) into zig, often in one shot.