I feel some sadness about Bun moving on. I really, really did not enjoy Rust but maybe I was too hasty. Or is this more about the power of infinite Claude tokens? I could fire up a frontier model and port my various projects to idiomatic Rust in a few hours, would that be some kind of capitulation?
I understand Zig’s official position re: ai, as well as the recent discussions about llm usage and ziggit.dev specifically. It’s a heated topic, I totally get it and I do not judge. Somewhat out-of-step, though, esp in a news cycle where we have celebrity software engineers showing off great results with agents. How much should we care about such things? FYI I hit the 5h LLM limit most days and I feel like I’m doing both the quickest and best work of my career. I’m just a faceless person here in this forum but my software has been happily used by many millions of people.
I definitely think it would be a mistake to assert that the Bun rewrite “won’t work” somehow. It will work. It already works, mostly, and it will continue to work better as they throw more tokens at it.
What can we learn from this moment? Sorry for the rant, just expressing some feelings.
Since Bun was aquired by Anthropic this whole “rewrite” feels like ongoing advertisement for Anthropic’s LLMs. “Oh look now we can rewrite from Zig to Rust using our amazing technology!”
Sadly your post also feels like veiled Anthropic ad
How do you know that? Maybe they will hit some kind of problem they won’t be easily solvable? Maybe “throwing more tokens” can’t solve any class of problem?
I am new to this forum, but I was previously a volunteer moderator on a very active Discourse forum - now there was a thankless task! - and there we would merge related topics rather aggressively. What is the approach in these parts, as this could belong under the following topic instead? https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-is-being-ported-from-zig-to-rust/
I think it’s valid for this to be a separate thread because, at the time of the previous thread, Jarred was still steadfastly denying that they are for real rewriting Bun in Rust. (A lesson to take what he says with a grain of salt.)
It’s probably the correct direction for them if they’re going all in on LLMs. Static guarantees are nice, especially so when you’re having LLMs write code for you. I’m still interested to see what an LLM conversion from zig to rust will end up looking like. I suspect it will be a mess, but I guess we’ll see.
If AI can actually program really well (given enough tokens) then the language being used is irrelevant. It could program in assembly, or even some form of bytecode only it understands.
And yet Anthropic acquired Bun instead porting Claude Code away from JavaScript.
That being said, a language with a strict compiler can provide another level of fast feedback to an LLM running in a coding harness like Claude Code, so I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that the language used doesn’t matter.
I heard recently that one should learn from mistakes, but not from failures—the thinking is, if you didn’t screw up but things went wrong, changing course is not correct, even if the result is feeling bad.
It’s hard to see how Bun porting to Rust is anybody on this thread’s mistake, so I don’t think learning from this moment is wise.
