10 ms·
From 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226 > I work on Bun and this is my branch > > Th
by legerdemain 4mo ago
From 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226
> I work on Bun and this is my branch
>
> This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.
>
> I’m curious to see what a working version of this looks, what it feels like, how it performs and if/how hard it’d be to get it to pass Bun’s test suite and be maintainable. I’d like to be able to compare a viable Rust version and a Zig version side by side.
- logicprog 4mo agoLooks like he did the maintainability performance and test suite checks and made his decision :)
- jazzypants 4mo agoHonestly, I fully support the rewrite to Rust, but he should have just owned this from the start. I'm sure he knew in the back of his mind how dedicated he was to that branch as he had already spent the equivalent of thousands of dollars in tokens by that point.
- fragmede 4mo agoYeah but with no guarantee that it was going to work, why should he have?
- jazzypants 4mo agoYeah, but he obviously had enough confidence in this project to keep the agents working at it, didn't he? Given infinite time and money, if you prompt an LLM about something enough times, it will eventually work. Insert something about monkeys, typewriters, and Shakespeare here.
- throw1234567891 4mo agoBut you didn’t have to sit and type. Assuming that you look at what it did, why not?
- furyofantares 4mo agoHe was 2 days into a project that ended up taking 6. You're being extremely unreasonable.
- nvme0n1p1 4mo agoBun was VC funded and acquired by Anthropic. He's spending company money, not his own money.
- jazzypants 4mo agoThat's why I said "the equivalent of". Additionally, time and cognitive effort are not free. The work spent on this branch was work that was not spent on other branches. Does that make sense?
- nvme0n1p1 4mo ago6 days is also nothing when you're doing R&D on your company's dime. He could have spent a month trying a dozen different things and thrown away all the code at the end. As long as he ends that month with a clear picture of where to steer the company over the next 5 years, it's time well spent.
- nozzlegear 4mo agoHad my former employers been so lenient with how I spend company time, I might still be an office worker instead of self-employed!
- throw1234567891 4mo agoNot even the company is spending money. It’s their employee working on a rework of the code owned by the company that owns the infrastructure on which the rework is done. And that company is still yet to turn profit. This work is subsidised by everyone who pays for Claude.
- skybrian 4mo agoAnnouncing the decision a week earlier wouldn't help anyone. Maybe he expected it to work (though he didn't say that), but there's no reason to make a final call before seeing that it did work.
- jazzypants 4mo agoFair enough. I didn't say anything about a "final call". It just feels like there is a middle ground between that and telling people they are overreacting.
- zephen 4mo agoBut he was just working along and someone else outed his branch, right? Dude doesn't owe you any sort of explanation.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- 4aksh19 4mo ago"No one has the intention of building a wall" - Walter Ulbricht, chairman of the central committee, a couple of months before the Berlin Wall was built. The AI companies and their associates are beginning to surpass that level of denials and lies.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- christopherwxyz 4mo agoIt’s disrespectful to immediately jump to adversarial conclusions from a simple desire to refactor and poor netiquette.
- dandellion 4mo agoFour days ago there was no intention to rewrite, now it's a simple desire to refactor. It's not adversarial conclusion, it's pointing out the clear hypocrisy.
- johncolanduoni 4mo agoRunning an experiment, the experiment being more successful than you thought, and then deciding to put more effort into a bigger experiment is not hypocrisy. It’s engineering. If you think some of the objective facts they’re putting out (like test coverage and performance) are lies, go and prove it instead of appealing to emotion.
- baranul 4mo agoEspecially if given near unlimited tokens to burn through, because any level of success fuels the LLM hype machine, which brings ROI. > It’s engineering. Significantly, but not totally. The marketing value can't be ignored.
- johncolanduoni 4mo ago
- Jarred 4mo agocargo check reported over 16,000 compiler errors when I wrote that message. It could not print a version number or run JavaScript. I didn’t expect it to work this quickly and I also didn’t expect the performance to be as competitive. There’ll be a blog post with more details.
- sysguest 4mo ago> I am so tired of worrying about & spending lots of time fixing memory leaks and crashes and stability issues. it would be so nice if the language provided more powerful tools for preventing these things. haven't used zig...(only used rust) but zig doesn't solve those problems?
- josephg 4mo agoNope! Zig is like C in this regard. There’s no borrow checker. Managing memory is your responsibility. It gives you a few more tools than C - like a debug allocator, bounds checked array slices and so on. But it’s not a memory safe language like rust.
- dnautics 4mo agoIt's not.. but im pretty sure it could be. could probably even take this (WIP) idea and bolt on a formal verifier pretty easily. https://github.com/ityonemo/clr https://github.com/ityonemo/clr
- josephg 4mo agoIt'd take more than that to match rust's borrow checker. Rust's borrow checker tracks lifetimes, and sometimes needs annotations in code to help it understand what you're actually trying to do. I suppose you could work around that by adding lifetime annotations in zig comments. Then you've have a language that's a lot like rust, but without an ecosystem of borrowck-safe libraries. And with worse ergonomics (rust knows when it can Drop). And rust can put noalias everywhere in emitted code. And you'd probably have worse error messages than the rust compiler emits. Its an interesting idea. But if you want static memory safety in a low level systems language, its probably much easier to just use rust.
- des429 4mo agoWhat's your point
- righthand 4mo agoTo demonstrate engineers may not be as skilled and knowledgeable as they appear. To make such a comment then turn around and make an announcement days later indicates that the engineers are not skilled in the tools they’re using or even possibly the domain they’re working in.
- esquivalience 4mo agoI totally disagree with this! I think it's very important for experts to be able to adapt to their opinions based on evidence.
- righthand 4mo ago[flagged]
- staticassertion 4mo agoHe's tweeting his experiences. Calling this "sprinting" and "evangelizing" is just rhetoric. Posting about a project you're working on is hardly amateurish.
- righthand 4mo ago[flagged]
- staticassertion 4mo ago[flagged]
- ianbutler 4mo ago[flagged]
- raincole 4mo agoYeah, that means it's an extremely successful experiment so far.
- lioeters 4mo agoAlso a few days before that: > I expect OSS to go the opposite direction: no human contribution allowed. Slop will be a nostalgic relic of 2025 & 2026. We should have seen this coming after they got acquired by Anthropic, but it's still disappointing. I'm not against large language models as a technology, just thoroughly disgusted how these "AI" companies rose to power, eating the software industry and the rest of society. It's creating a very unhealthy dependency. Think a few steps ahead and start preparing a slop-free software stack and community. That includes Zig and its ecosystem. Even if we (and future generations) don't manage to live entirely without slop, it's more important than ever to ensure a sustainable computing culture, free as in freedom.
- tempaccount5050 4mo agoSoftware companies have been about automating human labor since the invention of computers. It's the whole damn point. Why do you think finance used to be (sometimes still is) the head of the IT dept? Because we automated accounting away. Then typists. Then secretaries. Then drafting. Etc etc.
- claude_delusion 4mo ago[flagged]
- tempaccount5050 4mo ago"ok guys, that's enough progress since now it's my job at stake, we can stop."
- satvikpendem 4mo agoDon't make accounts just to add comments for a specific thread, you will get flagged.
- wiseowise 4mo ago> It's the whole damn point. Believe it or not, for some of us it’s not “the whole damn point”.
- faangguyindia 4mo agoHe works at claude, he has unlimited tokens. He can do anything, he is using mythos.
- not_paid_by_yt 4mo agowhat one has to do when corporate does not not them use GPT-5.5
- scotty79 4mo agoI think such re-implementations will be a huge asset to the process of software developments in the future.
- openclawclub 4mo ago[flagged]