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·
    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
      0·
      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…