Bun 1.4 Rust rewrite is not looking good • Tero Piirainen
tipiirai.com

The last three months have not looked good for Bun. It started as one of the most impressive individual engineering projects I have seen, but has now turned into this weird AI-powered creature with continuous false promises and an increasingly frustrated community.

  • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    4 days ago

    This is becoming the most interesting case of vibe coding. Bun had a pretty good thing going before all this went down. They have the investment and basically unlimited resources of anthropic, yet now still months without a release and still finding thousands of bugs to resolve.

    I’m curious to see if the team eventually reverts to a zig release, or continues sinking resources into this rewrite. In the meantime, who knows how far bun will fade from relevance.

    • trem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 days ago

      In case you’re not aware, the company behind Bun is now owned by Anthropic. So, IMHO there is no way they’ll revert the rewrite, because that decision would have to come from Anthropic and they have a ton of reputation to lose.

      I guess, I could see them trying to justify a revert by flinging mud at Rust, like they did with Zig, but I don’t know if they dare.
      It’s easier to punch down for Zig, because comparatively few people know it. And there’s also already uv, which is a package manager for Python, written in Rust, so clearly the Bun rewrite should be possible.

      • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        3 days ago

        I’m not sure anthropic entirely dictated that bun was rewritten into rust, but I am sure they were thrilled when they got the news it was happening. I’ll mention I’m not questioning the feasibility of “Bun in Rust”, but I am questioning if the slopmachine can ever get it stitched back together and stabilized. If they end up going 6 months or a year without the release both bun and anthropic end up looking pretty dumb, and I don’t know if the dev world is going to have that kind of patience.

        This initiative was promoted up as the halo project that proves LLMs are ready to take over a difficult production codebase, and the speed of the conversion was touted as proof that the era of writing code was over. At 3 months I think right now they are still ahead of any “manual” re-write timeline, but it could end up proving the exact opposite as this drags on.

        • trem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          3 days ago

          Yeah, it’s going to be interesting. In principle, this is something that LLMs are good at, i.e. taking some existing thing and just translating it into a different language. But from what the Zig creator said about the Bun codebase, a lot of those hacks may be difficult to translate into Rust, and of course have a lot of potential for bugs.

          And well, they do also have the problem that they cannot halfass this rewrite, which LLMs are not good at. If they publish a new version and it’s a buggy mess, it will still look bad…

      • hikaru755@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        In case you’re not aware

        They literally mentioned anthropic by name, so I’m pretty sure they’re aware 😅

        And there’s also already uv, which is a package manager for Python, written in Rust, so clearly the Bun rewrite should be possible.

        Bun is a whole lot more than a package manager, though. It’s also a full JS/TS runtime, bundler and test runner. So I don’t think that’s a great comparison

        • trem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          0·
          3 days ago

          Well, Anthropic have previously used their near-infinite investor money to give out tokens to open-source projects as a publicity stunt. And it just seemed so impossible to me that they would revert when they’re owned by Anthropic, that it made me unsure, if they’re aware of this ownership… 😅

          And good point about Bun being more than just a package manager.
          uv is also more than a package manager. Pretty sure, it could also be referred to as a bundler and a test runner, and I’ve seen it used to manage the install of different Python runtime versions. But yeah, being a full language runtime by itself, that is the big one here.

          I mean, there’s also a near-infinite supply of toy programming languages being implemented in Rust, if the LLM needs something to ripoff, but yeah, a production codebase will be magnitudes more complex, of course.