thereâs now a company with a $350 billion valuation running one of Zigâs most visible downstream projects (in my head that list includes Ghostty, TigerBeetle, Bun, in no particular order).
optimistically, that is good news for ZSF in a number of ways. it validates Zig as a viable platform for companies to build on, potentially bringing with it more eyes on the ecosystem. we also can assume that the money behind Anthropic will find its way upstream through contributions by full time staff, or direct financial contributions to ZSF.
on the other hand, that valuation brings a lot of potential influence by a company that is building tools that are arguably against a lot of the principles/beliefs held by the core team.
I donât really have any feelings at this point, but all I can say is that I did not have this on my bingo card! I do have confidence in Andrew and team to navigate it.
meh.ââââââââââ
Might be a case of the purchasing of real assets with fake money. Everyone know thereâs an enormous bubble in the AI space. As had happened previously, the majority of firms with multi-billion valuations today will end up becoming worthless. Smart owners would diversify so that they donât get wipe out when the bubble busts.
Iâm torn by news like this (and recall similar feelings when they first raised money). In an ideal world Bun remains independent from this sort of influence but I also understand people need money to live and have different desires and values, so who am I to tell them how to live their livesâŚ
It makes me admire ZSF more and also a tad curious if there are many bags of âcashâ theyâve left behind while sticking to their valuesâŚ
In terms of what I think this means to zig. Anthropic wouldâve done their due diligence into zig as part of this, so I read it as theyâre confident in zigs future, and Iâd like to think this confidence will spread in the industry due to this news⌠with that said Iâm a little disappointed there isnât more of a call out to zig in the announcement
To be fair, Zig is not the reason they made the acquisition. It was for the fact that Bun is a good JavaScript runtime. So not calling out Zig is probably because it wasnât a big factor for them.
Yeah thatâs fair. Itâs a non trivial amount of work in achieving what they have and itâs kinda turtles all the way down when it comes to dependencies so weâre all building on top of the people before us.
this is weird on so many levels. why does anyone need javascript to develop a cli app. openai doesnât.
They still use it to distribute the CLI app though, because âCertainly every developer has npm and can just run npm i -g â.
I hate JavaScript.
Obscure side note - wasnât long ago before this acquisition, Jarred was posting in depth questions about how LLMs work, on twitter (or whatever itâs called now)
The gist of it was âwhy exactly are LLMs so slow ?â. You could literally hear the cogs in Jarredâs mind ticking away looking for some overlooked optimisation that should radically improve performance. Almost like he was thinking hard about doing to LLMs what he did with JS bundling.
Of course, all the âAI expertsâ on X were quick to let him know he was completely clueless about the subject, and no optimisation would ever be possible, because ⌠thatâs just the way it is. I can imagine this was like waving a huge red blanket in front of a Bull for Jarred, lol.
Well, as it turns out âthe clueless oneâ now gets the red carpet invite to join the brains trust at one of the leaders of gen AI ⌠and no doubt will get to explore his LLM optimisation questions in proper detail in good time. The âAI expertsâ on X must be livid with jealousy now 
Whatever the deal is with Anthropic buying Bun, the crown jewel of the deal has to be that they have acquired Jarred himself, who has to be one of the few stubbornly obsessed-with-performance devs on the planet right now. (With a track record of delivery to back it up)
If thatâs the case, Anthropic may have got the bargain of the century here.
I actually think itâs probably a match in heaven for both parties.
Javascript is a good platform for vibe coding. Letting non developers play at making their own simple playgrounds. Being able to bundle a bunch of vibe code in a secure javascript runtime means youâre less vulnerable.
Bun doesnât have to look for annoying ways to monetize their project. And it sounds like they think itâs fun to play with.
On top itâs a flex against Google who got serious backlash for âhelpingâ open source the wrong way.
Even though there are lotâs of buzzwords used, I think this is a good thing for Zig. Getting people into the ecosystem is good. This may not be aligned with the ZFS ideology, but who cares. As long as the core team is solid, throwing around a bazillion dollars in front of them wonât really change anything. The potential of getting highly talented people familiar with the ideas of the language outweighs all the VC something something AI LLM startup aqusition funding blah blah stuff imo
I think this is a very good news, one that will bring more confidence into Zig, this is another proof that you can use Zig in production (despite Andrewâs claim 
) and make money. This is great, and as more production grade projects, and companies gets built around Zig, the more attention it will receive, and the more resources too. Iâm really happy with the news.
because âCertainly every developer has npm and can just run npm i -g â.
âMichael Caine voiceâ: not many people know that npm can be used as C/C++ package manager
âŚused like this:
https://gitlab.com/floooh/sokol-npm-demo/-/blob/main/package.json?ref_type=heads
(it was just an experiment and isnât uptodate or maintained - works just fine though)
WowâŚthat is deeply cursed in a way I didnât even know was possible.
Is the Bun JS runtime written in Zig?
AFAIK the JS engine is JavaScriptCore (e.g. whatâs used in WebKit/Safari) and the ânode.js and npm partsâ are written in Zig (e.g. quite similar to Deno, except in Deno itâs V8 and Rust).
In the end npm is just a file downloader and task runner
still waiting for the 512k+ pledge to ZSF to drop from Dario so that their agentic javascript cli could keep writing most of their code