| ▲ | stingraycharles 5 hours ago |
| Interesting to see this when the current top post on HN is someone worrying about Bun as it was acquired by Anthropic. The top comment there describes “Anthropic does experiments on their own codebase, the Bun team is not gonna do the same vibe coding experiments”. Yet here we are, what looks like a massive undertaking for vibe coding. Time will tell how this will turn out. Would be nice if the Bun maintainers could give some clarification about what they’re doing here, and why they’re doing this. |
|
| ▲ | andkenneth 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| They recently tried to upstream an improvement to zig, but were prevented from doing so because zig has a hard and fast "no AI code" rule. Whether you think this response is trying to put pressure on zig or whether they're just moving for practical reasons is up to you. It's probably a bit of both. |
| |
| ▲ | norman784 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Not only because the AI part, here's a discussion [0] about it [0] https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-s-zig-fork-got-4x-faster-compilatio... | |
| ▲ | SkiFire13 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > but were prevented from doing so because zig has a hard and fast "no AI code" rule The patch would have been rejected either way because it was out of date and conflicted with other work going on. | |
| ▲ | endospore 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Makes me wonder why zig announced the strict LLM rule recently. I'm afraid one reason could be that zig doesn't want to accept code from the bun fork in the first place (because of LLM usage, deviation and other reasons) | | |
| ▲ | neomantra 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | One non-obvious reason is that an important aspect of their community is to shepherd new contributors [1]. LLMs crushing everything would reduce that. More obvious is all the toil for maintainers dealing with LLM PRs (broadly it’s an issue). The Zig maintainers prefer to put their energy into improving people and fostering those relationship. [1] https://kristoff.it/blog/contributor-poker-and-ai/ | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That's a solid reason to keep LLMs away from the kind of tasks that help with onboarding. But a patch series from a competent team that changes 3000 lines should probably be evaluated on its own merits. Or at least, the collaboration-based reasons to reject AI don't apply and the real reason would be something else. (Though I don't know if this particular patch series would get accepted on its own merits.) | | |
| ▲ | riffraff 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The recent article explained the bun patch would have been refused on technical merits as it's intrinsically incorrect, to be able to work properly it required some language changes. | |
| ▲ | bboozzoo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > patch series from a competent team that changes 3000 lines should probably be split into a bunch of much smaller changes? | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 34 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I don't understand your suggestion. If you take an ugly patch series that changes 3000 lines and organize it into small quality changes, it's still a patch series that changes 3000 lines. There's no reason to assume my generic statement was talking about the ugly version rather than the nicely organized version. |
| |
| ▲ | moomoo11 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean in an authoritarian system you wouldn’t make a one off exception like that. |
| |
| ▲ | bbor 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Well said! I don't think either party is really at fault here, but if Anthropic wanted to contribute non-negligible amounts of code over time then it's an absolute dealbreaker. Sucks for people who were invested in contributing to Bun and don't like working with AI tools to be sure, but I think the writing was on the wall for them pretty much immediately post-acquisition. You must admit, it's hard to predict that 100% of source lines will be written by AI if you're not walking the walk! | |
| ▲ | lowbloodsugar 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah, I remember when the lazy bastards started writing programs using compilers instead of learning assembly language. Now I don’t have a single colleague who can write assembly. There’s whole generations now who can’t code assembly. Most don’t even know what a register is. Hope Zig holds against this latest attempt to make everyone stupid. | | |
| ▲ | uncircle an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | To add to the other commenters, loads of people don’t know assembly, which speaks to the quality of the average developer. The ones that still understand assembly to this day tend to be better developers, writing faster and more efficient code. | | |
| ▲ | crysin a minute ago | parent | next [-] | | I'd be very surprised if the "average" developer across the board was in fact not just a JavaScript / TypeScript only developer. I have no expectations or really even hope that the average developer I work with has ever written a line of assembly. | |
| ▲ | DeathArrow 11 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | >The ones that still understand assembly to this day tend to be better developers, writing faster and more efficient code. That is if you use something like C, C+=, Java, .NET, Go. With Javascript and Python I don't think knowing assembly would make any difference because it's hard to optimize the code in these languages for how the CPU and memory works. |
| |
| ▲ | gls2ro 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Generating AI code/PR is not the same as using compilers because of at least two things: - the scale of how much and how fast you can generate code with AI vs how fast can you write code for compiler - the mental model of what is being generated and how much the contributor understands and owns the generated code | |
| ▲ | wtetzner 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Using an LLM isn't analogous to using a higher level language. | | |
| ▲ | brabel 6 minutes ago | parent [-] | | That’s funny because it’s exactly, literally the same. The difference is it’s not deterministic. That may be a problem but it’s still a higher level language, just a much higher level language than anything before. | | |
| ▲ | xigoi a minute ago | parent [-] | | The main difference is that the input to an LLM is in an ambiguous language. |
|
| |
| ▲ | gertop 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Your analogy falls apart because the "lazy bastards" still knew how to program and understood the code they were working on. Vide-coders often don't read, let alone understand, the code they send for PRs. |
|
| |
| ▲ | foresterre 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There are other reasons why a project like Zig might not want to accept LLM generated contributions. Zig, as programming language, has a multiplier codebase. A bug may affect a significant larger portion of users than most libraries or binaries will, as it's a fundamental building block of everything that uses Zig. Just that could be worth the extra scrutiny on every individual commit. There's also the usual arguments: copyright ethics, environmental ethics and maintainer burden. | | |
| ▲ | esperent an hour ago | parent [-] | | > has a multiplier codebase. A bug may affect a significant larger portion of users than most libraries or binaries will Couldn't you say exactly the same about bun? | | |
| ▲ | emaro a minute ago | parent [-] | | Sure, but Bun is now owned by a company who's entire shtick is creating AI models. That shifts priorities. |
|
| |
| ▲ | DeathArrow an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >Makes me wonder why zig announced the strict LLM rule recently. I guess there are 2 philosophies in software development: move fast and break things and move at a pace that guarantees everything is rock solid. Most commercial software, Anthropic included is taking the former path, while most infrastructure teams are taking the later. I guess Linux and FreeBSD kernels are also not accepting LLM based contributions yet. | | | |
| ▲ | KingMob 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Possibly, but the Zig creator is active on Lobste.rs, where he's been vocally anti-LLM for a year now, so the timing could just be a coincidence. | |
| ▲ | ai_critic 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's a combination of pragmatism (not wanting to wade through slop, not wanting to shove out newbie developers) and politics (usual contemporary techie progressive stuff that's now oddly anti-technology). | | |
| |
| ▲ | sevenzero 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I see that as a win for Zig. | |
| ▲ | wg0 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So if tomorrow Rust denied the "improvement" to upstream Rust then what's the next language they plan to vibe code it in? | | |
| ▲ | f33d5173 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Rust is a significantly more mature language. Adoption of zig has to be done on the assumption that the language will significantly improve as your project evolves, and if those improvements don't agree with your project's goals you're in something of a lurch. Rust is basically finished and adopting it has to be done on the assumption it won't change very much. I don't know what their initial logic for adopting zig was, but I think porting to a more mature language was inevitable, unless by some miracle zig happened to rapidly mature in exactly the direction they wanted, | |
| ▲ | petre 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | C obviously. | | |
| ▲ | wg0 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I was hoping bash because why not. It's AI that has to work and maintain anyway and Anthropic employees aren't limited by 5 hour 7 days limits anyway I suppose. |
| |
| ▲ | postepowanieadm 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Perl | |
| ▲ | echelon 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Rust is legit one of the best languages to "vibe code" in. The emitted AST has a lower defect rate since it incorporates strong types and in-built error handling. Other pros include native code and portability, but downside is the compile time. | | |
| ▲ | J_Shelby_J 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Downside: CC and Codex will write, compile, and fix in a loop until it has a monstrosity rather than designing something smarter. | |
| ▲ | wg0 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This could be a subjective feeling with no real data to back it up. People say same about Go as well that it's type system and limited feature set makes it the best AI friendly language but there too, it just seems like a hunch rather than a proven fact. | | |
| ▲ | treyd 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The thing is that this argument doesn't work with Go because its type system (and the whole language, really) is much less expressive and compiler gives a lot less feedback to the LLM. So it tends to have to write more unit tests and do more cycles of testing (and spend more tokens) to get it right. | | |
| ▲ | wg0 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The argument about type system is absurd anyway. The types in a program aren't a universal vocabulary that the LLM would already know about like the words of English language. They are unique to each program and domain so an LLM can't be better at it. Let me elaborate further - it's like the proficiency of LLMs in writing English vs writing Sawahili or Kurdish. The types of a program are like Swahili or Kurdish etc even worse because those languages still have sizeable chuck on the Internet and digital archives but types of a program are very specific to it. | | |
| ▲ | treyd 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Studies have shown that natural human languages are all more or less equally expressive in terms of bits per second while speaking. There's lots of different ways they can be structured but they tend to follow common rules that have been well-characterized by linguists. They can be used to describe formal mathematical statements, but are not rigorously formal languages themselves. Programming languages, in contrast, are constructed and vary much more in their designs. They are formal languages, making them closer to math than spoken language. LLMs being able to describe concepts more thoroughly and precisely through more expressive semantics obviously makes some languages more suitable than others. The type system of a language is just one aspect of it that allows the language to provide guarantees to the LLM (and the user) about correctness of the code it's writing. I am not speaking about specific types in specific programs. I am talking about the ability to describe complex constraints that LLMs (and humans) end up using to make writing correct code easier and more productive. Some programming languages absolutely are more effective at this than others, and that's always been true even before LLMs. |
|
| |
| ▲ | Onavo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If we are gonna go down that rabbit hole, then the natural conclusion is Haskell. | | |
| ▲ | boxed 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Which seems pretty reasonable tbh. Claude Code is amazing with Elm in my experience. |
|
| |
| ▲ | nvader 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Excellent comment. As a downside, the compile time is somewhat offset once you're using agents (and especially parallel agents) anyway. Since all of your edits cost a round-trip API call to a third party server, you can accept a slightly slower compile step. |
|
| |
| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | pton_xd 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Anthropic just needs to buy Zig! Problem solved. | | |
| ▲ | esperent an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Perfect A/B experiment opportunity. Fork Zig, call the fork Zag. Lock the syntax/api together for a couple of years. Allow AI code in Zag. Review after a few years, see which is better. | | |
| ▲ | GCUMstlyHarmls 30 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Interesting experiment, would it actually function if Zag was syntax/api locked to Zig? I guess Zag could still have api extensions. |
| |
| ▲ | xeonmc 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Take off every Zig | | |
| ▲ | ratioprosperous 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's time! https://xkcd.com/286/ | | |
| ▲ | kelnos 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Wow. That xkcd was written in 2007, and part of the dialog is "didn't that [meme] die like five years ago?" Which means All Your Base, as a meme, was already getting somewhat stale by around 2002. It's hard to believe it's been that long. | | |
|
| |
| ▲ | mirekrusin an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | ...and rewrite it in rs. |
| |
| ▲ | rdmsr0 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Even if AI had not been used, the changes would not have been upstreamed, see https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-s-zig-fork-got-4x-faster-compilatio...
tl;dr the supposed improvements are not sound and the zig compiler has already gotten a whole lot faster | | |
| ▲ | nechuchelo 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This should be the top comment in the whole thread. AI is not the point, the PR is just not of a good quality. | |
| ▲ | abpin 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Thanks, that is the answer. | |
| ▲ | NewJazz 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What a sober, detailed forum post. | |
| ▲ | abtinf 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That is a devastating comment. I will now be extremely skeptical of bun. |
| |
| ▲ | parchley 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Read the previous discussions on the topic. Your summary is a sensationalist lie, since their change was apparently a smoking pile of hot garbage, and Zig already had similar performance gains in a newer release. | |
| ▲ | giancarlostoro 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Probably moreso going with the native language that is reliable and battle tested. Rust runs on Firefox, and in production at several systems across major orgs, this is not surprising. | |
| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | DeathArrow an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >They recently tried to upstream an improvement to zig, but were prevented from doing so because zig has a hard and fast "no AI code" rule. And will Rust team accept their vibe coded patches? | |
| ▲ | abacadaba 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | seems easier to fork zig | | |
| ▲ | kimos 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Then that becomes an ongoing effort. The rewrite is once. (Good idea or not) |
| |
| ▲ | cybercatgurrl 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | good, more reason to stay away from zig | | |
|
|
| ▲ | malisper 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > what looks like a massive undertaking for vibe coding fwiw, I suspect it's less of an undertaking than you may think. I've been playing with AI to rewrite Postgres in Rust[0] over the past couple of weeks and I found the AI to be exceptional at doing rewrites. Having an existing codebase you can reference prevents a lot of the problems you have with vibecoding. You have an existing architecture that works well and have a test suite that you can test against Over the course of a month I've gone from nothing to passing over 95% of the Postgres test suite. Given Jarred built Bun, I bet he'll be able to go much faster [0] https://github.com/malisper/pgrust |
| |
| ▲ | nailer 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I suspect it's less of an undertaking than you may think... having an existing codebase you can reference prevents a lot of the problems you have with vibecoding. That's because it's not vibe coding - stingraycharles doesn't seem to understand what vibe coding is. Vibe coding was defined here https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 > There's a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. This is very far from Anthropic's migration plans. | | |
| ▲ | andai 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah, it's a distinction worth making, and the language for making it kind of sucks. Vibe coding means "AI does the whole thing", or "I use tab autocomplete" depending on who you ask. It's not a very useful term anymore, we need better ones. My benchmark is basically, "are you letting the AI drive." In this case, an AI appears to have written the migration guide... | | |
| ▲ | wrs 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It was and is a perfectly good term, but people started using it without regard for its definition. I don't know why people wouldn't misuse a "better" term the same way. | | |
| ▲ | kelnos 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | In this case I think the current zeitgeist (at least among zoomers and younger millennials) really loves the word "vibe". Once they hear of the term "vibe coding", they just want to be able to say it, even if what they're doing isn't really vibe coding. And then that leaks outside their social and age groups, because other people hear the incorrect usage, get confused, and incorporate that confusion into their own use of the term. | | |
| ▲ | uncircle an hour ago | parent [-] | | Waiting until they decide to call non-assisted programming ‘unc coding’ | | |
| ▲ | kelnos an hour ago | parent [-] | | As someone who might be described as an "unc", I had to look up what "unc" meant. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | c0rruptbytes 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | i mean AI docs are usually the result of collabs between users and AI using /plan with superpowers, i see a lot of specs -> impl plan -> execute plan |
| |
| ▲ | bitwize 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "Vibe coding" = "let Dario take the wheel" as ThePrimeagen puts it. | |
| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
|
|
|
| ▲ | mroche 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I do not know if there's any overlap between these teams, but it seems like Anthropic itself is fairly invested in the Rust ecosystem. They recently proposed some of their internal tools to be the official Rust implementation[0] of Connect RPC[1]. As a protobuf based library set, this includes a new Rust-based protobuf compiler, Buffa[2]. [0]: https://github.com/orgs/connectrpc/discussions/7#discussionc... [1]: https://connectrpc.com/ [2]: https://github.com/anthropics/buffa |
|
| ▲ | Avicebron 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I imagine claude is better at Rust than Zig? |
| |
| ▲ | allthetime 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Zig is a moving target. 0.15 -> 0.16 includes some massive structural changes concerning IO and async/threading. Claude has absolutely no idea what it's doing with bleeding edge zig unless you feed it source and guide it closely (in which case it's useful for focused work) - I'm building a game engine & tcp/udp servers with it and it requires a hands-on approach and actually understanding what's being built. I imagine these are not really concerns with rust at this point. In my ideal world the team behind bun would be putting in the work to keep up with modern zig, but it's starting to look like they are running mostly on vibes in which case rust might be a better choice. | | |
| ▲ | rudedogg 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > it requires a hands-on approach and actually understanding what's being built. I think this is true regardless of what language you’re using. I’ve built a lot in Zig and there’s no difference between vibing stuff in it versus TypeScript/React. Claude can “one-shot” them both, and will mimic existing code or grep the standard library to figure everything out. | |
| ▲ | 10000truths 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > unless you feed it source Which isn't particularly difficult - the language docs and std source come with the installation, so all you need to do is tell Claude where those directories are in your skill/plugin/CLAUDE.md. > and guide it closely (in which case it's useful for focused work) It does struggle sometimes with writing code that compiles and uses the APIs correctly. My approach to that so far has been to write test blocks describing the desired interface + semantics, and asking Claude to (`zig test` -> fix errors) in a loop until all the tests pass. | | |
| ▲ | allthetime 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You're already at a disadvantage having to stuff the context and spend extra tokens coercing the model in the correct direction compared to it already knowing what to do (rust, ts, go, etc.) Here, I just did a quick test with claude. 1. "make a simple tcp echo server that uses rust" compiles and runs - took a few seconds to generate. 2. "make a simple tcp echo server that uses zig" result: compile error, took literal minutes of spinning and thinking to generate response: "ziglang.org isn't in the allowed domains. Let me check if there's another way, or just verify the code compiles conceptually and present it clean." /opt/homebrew/Cellar/zig/0.15.2/lib/zig/std/Io/Writer.zig:1200:9: error: ambiguous format string; specify {f} to call format method, or {any} to skip it
@compileError("ambiguous format string; specify {f} to call format method, or {any} to skip it");
^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 3. "make a simple tcp echo server that uses zig 0.16" result: compile error: zig build-exe main.zig
main.zig:30:21: error: no field named 'io' in struct 'process.Init.Minimal'
const io = init.io;
^~ 4. "make a simple tcp echo server that uses zig 0.15" result: compile error zig build-exe main.zig
/nix/store/as1zlvrrwwh69ii56xg6yd7f6xyjx8mv-zig-0.15.2/lib/std/Io/Writer.zig:1200:9: error: ambiguous format string; specify {f} to call format method, or {any} to skip it
@compileError("ambiguous format string; specify {f} to call format method, or {any} to skip it"); Rust took seconds and just works. Zig examples took minutes and don't work out of the box. The DX & velocity isn't even close. | | |
| ▲ | dimator 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | i mean, if zig is doing its best (inadvertently) at shooing off slop jockeys, then i already have more confidence that: 1. the language and stdlib are written by people who know what they're doing
2. packages in the ecosystem, at the barest level, are written by those who didn't leave after a few compile errors they couldn't reason about | | |
| ▲ | Philpax 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The agents will churn their way through the errors. The new users whose learning material is out of date, as well as the existing users that have an insurmountable task in updating their code, will give up instead. I think the changes are improvements, but there's a real cost to language churn, and every time it happens, the graveyard of projects grows just that little bit larger. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
| |
| ▲ | fcarraldo 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Contributors and maintainers will also be easier to find in Rust than Zig. Zig is a great language and I want to see it succeed, but this is a prudent move for Bun. | | |
| ▲ | GuB-42 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I wouldn't call any port "prudent". In general, taking mature software and doing any major rewrite is one of the riskiest thing you can do. It is a large scale attempt to fix what isn't broken. Sometimes it is worth it, but it may also kill projects. A risky move. And AI doesn't help its cause. AI can save a lot of time when making ports, it is one of the things it does best, but it doesn't protect from regressions. I am not using Bun in production, but if I was, I would consider it a risk. Not because of Rust vs Zig, but for changing things that work. | |
| ▲ | versecafe 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is likely irrelevant given bun has stopped taking community PR's entirely and Jarred is pitching that human contributors should be banned. | | |
| ▲ | etoxin 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There is like 1,713 open PR's on the Bun repo. I'm assuming all are from Claude or robobun?. I guess this gives us an insight on what the claude-code workflow look likes. Crazy times. | |
| ▲ | jabedude 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Where is a source for either of these extraordinary claims? | | |
| ▲ | csande17 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2048434628248359284 | | |
| ▲ | lioeters 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Wow, didn't realize how bad the situation was. Completely lost any respect and trust I had in the Bun project and its lead dev. | |
| ▲ | kelnos an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What a weird take. I do a ton of OSS, and the act of writing code is what makes it fun for me. If I were forced to use an LLM to write all my OSS code, I would just not do it anymore. | |
| ▲ | shadowfiend 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The gp's interpretation of that tweet is such a completely incorrect reading as to make one think it's likely disingenuous. | | |
| ▲ | slopinthebag 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I expect OSS to go the opposite direction: no human contribution allowed. How is it an incorrect interpretation? Jared is indeed pitching/suggesting/predicting that human contribution will not be allowed in the near future, i.e. banned. | | |
| ▲ | kelnos an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | "Pitching" generally means that the person making the pitch is endorsing and pushing for it. (This might also be a regional word meaning/usage difference type thing.) The person upthread should have said "predicting". | |
| ▲ | Philpax 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A prediction is not a policy. |
|
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | TheRoque 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why didn't they use Rust in the first place then ? All this was true before AI | | |
| ▲ | tux1968 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Anthropic only acquired Bun in December of last year. They weren't there in the first place, to make the decision. |
| |
| ▲ | unclad5968 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't think Zig is different enough from rust or any other systems language for it to matter. If you can write rust you can write Zig. | | |
| ▲ | jaggederest 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Anthropic makes claude, claude can write Rust like a champ and struggles at Zig. It's a straightforward "training data" argument. I think there are even longer term plays that Anthropic should be looking at, in this space, but it seems like they've decided rust is the right thing, so fair play. I would be (am!) thinking about making an LLM optimized high level language that you can generate / train on intensively because you control the language spec. | | |
| ▲ | aabhay 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Claude doesn’t write Rust like a champ. It’s still miles ahead at js and python than it is at rust. It can do macros and single file optimizations but its gotten really stuck in type hell and tried to dyn everything on multiple occasions for me. | | |
| ▲ | vlovich123 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Claude struggling at Rust: not getting types correct, using the wrong abstractions, not implementing things correctly Claude struggling at Zig: the above + memory safety issues if you run “fast” mode. It is generally true that Rust code tends to be written in a way that the compiler catches the issue at compile time. The same is not as true for Zig, Python or JS |
| |
| ▲ | dnautics 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | claude does not struggle with zig? not in my hands anyways. |
| |
| ▲ | speed_spread 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm reminded of the old joke "how to shoot yourself in the foot in 25 different languages". The first one was "C - you shoot yourself in the foot." Zig remains very close to that philosophy. So the difference is not in writing new stuff but in maintaining the existing codebase. Rust's rigidity makes it potentially harder to break stuff compared to Zig's general flexibility. As a project grows and matures, different types of contributors naturally come in and it's unreasonable to expect everyone to learn about historical footguns that may have accumulated. |
| |
| ▲ | chrisweekly 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 100%.
For many people, Bun is the only reason they've even heard of Zig. I'm not in a position to comment intelligently on comparative language features per se, but when it comes to mindshare and community size, Rust is a clear winner. | | |
| ▲ | majormajor 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | fwiw before today I'd heard of Zig and not Bun :D something JS-adjacent could certainly be more known than an obscure language but are that many people using drop-in node replacements? | | |
|
| |
| ▲ | kllrnohj 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I would expect all LLMs are going to be better at Rust than Zig - a strong, thorough compiler will simply prevent more mistakes, and the benefits of a "simple" language decreases the larger the code base gets. The more abstractions exist, the less valuable "no hidden control flow" or "no hidden allocations" from the standard library get, and that's before you add the mother of all abstractions of vibe coding. | | |
| ▲ | pizlonator 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I have no doubt that LLMs are good at Rust. But I can’t reconcile the reasoning about “strong, thorough compiler” with the fact that LLMs are also fantastic at Ruby. They also write really great posix shell (including very sophisticated scripts) and python. Something more subtle is going on. | | |
| ▲ | josephg 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They do work well. But I still see the occasional type related issue or bug from refactoring that claude will introduce into javascript and python code. It seems to be happening less and less frequently as the models get better. But, the rust compiler catches real bugs in LLM code. I consider that a win. Has anyone made any cross language benchmarks for LLMs? I wonder if rust's conceptual complexity makes it harder for LLMs to write? If all you care about is working software, which language is best for LLMs? Python, because there's more example code? Go or Java, because they're simpler languages? Ruby because its terse? Rust because of the compiler? I'd love to see a comparison! | |
| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | faangguyindia 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| anthropic just wanted to "codex" like bragging rights of codex being developed in rust. so they are now going to write bun in rust, and then claudecode can use claim to be built on rust. |
|
| ▲ | debarshri an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think itnis ok to use or build vibe coded tools if it is built by experts in the domain and they take the ownership. |
|
| ▲ | simultsop 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The industry does not shape bases on HN top posts, nor media buzz.
Remember youtube birth. Necessity, available tech, fresh talent. I believe now we have all but we fail at choosing. |
|
| ▲ | NewsaHackO 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| But why should they? This just seems like the groundwork for an initial refactor and moving from one language to another. They haven't actually committed to switching from Zig to Rust yet. I mean, I get if you are an investor and you want to see if they are using their time effectively, but why would it matter to anyone else? |
| |
| ▲ | stingraycharles 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They’re not required to do so, but like I said, it would be nice, because it removes a lot of speculation. And development is in the open, so people notice what they’re doing. | |
| ▲ | SergeAx 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Lots of people, me included, heavily invested their time and expertise into Bun, using it as a daily driver, to bundle production code or even using it in production as a JS/TS runtime. Of course, we are interested in Bun to stay a useful tool. The Anthropic acquisition was worrying enough on its own. | | |
| ▲ | NewsaHackO 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | But there isn't any change in someone's expertise in Bun though, currently, just in development. Why would they have to dive you into a daily stand-up about their development process? |
|
|
|
| ▲ | nailer 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > what looks like a massive undertaking for vibe coding It doesn’t look like that at all. Do you think that all use of AI is vibe coding? |
| |
| ▲ | WD-42 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Did you look at the branch? This is vibed, even with the most liberal definition https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/compare/claude/phase-a-port This single commit is 65k lines of additions https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/commit/ffa6ce211a0267161ae48b... | | |
| ▲ | nailer 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The definition is at https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 and no that does not match what is in the branch. Systemically migrating a code base using an LLM does not match the defintion of vibe coding. There's a decent article by Simon Willison that talks about this: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/ > I’m seeing people apply the term “vibe coding” to all forms of code written with the assistance of AI. I think that both dilutes the term and gives a false impression of what’s possible with responsible AI-assisted programming. | | |
| ▲ | WD-42 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You're right, all 750k lines of code added in a single day - definitely reviewed and completely understood. | |
| ▲ | rzmmm 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Here is the Wiktionary definition for curiosity. > (programming, neologism) A method of programming in which a developer generates code by repeatedly prompting a large language model. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vibe_coding | | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The dilution of the term is a real problem sometimes. But pointing your AI at an entire codebase to transpile pretty much entirely by itself? Yeah vibe coding is a fitting term. Even if you wrote it a small essay on how to Rust. That improves the situation but doesn't change the core autonomy/hope of the task. | |
| ▲ | brailsafe 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is just a coined term; definitions evolve over time based on usage | | |
| ▲ | kelnos an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Then "vibe coding" is a useless term, if it just means "LLM-assisted coding". We might as well just say "LLM-assisted coding" or "AI coding" or whatever. As much as I find the word "vibe" generally annoying (in all contexts), I actually really like "vibe coding" as "LLM did everything and I didn't even look at it". It's a succinct, useful way to describe that mode of doing things. Diluting it down to "LLM-assisted coding" makes it useless. | | | |
| ▲ | gschizas 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | All language is "coined terms". The point is that if you dilute the definition of a term, you make the term useless. Evolution of a term isn't done automatically. Correcting terms such as these pushed the evolution in a more useful way. Also, evolution of language is not a magic spell that automatically forgives people on making language mistakes. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | stingraycharles 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think the definition of vibe coding is a bit fluid, in this case I just meant it to be “code fully generated by AI, possibly not fully reviewed by human eyes”. I agree that this definitely not “coding based purely off vibes”, and the approach looks legit. | |
| ▲ | allthetime 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | what would you call a fully uncommented commit with "+27,939Lines changed: 27939 additions & 0 deletions" of new rust code | | |
| ▲ | LamaOfRuin 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The commit would look exactly like that if it was a 100% deterministic transpilation (like Golang did with their original C implementation?). This is obviously very different from that, but the way the commit looks doesn't make it so. | | |
| ▲ | kelnos an hour ago | parent [-] | | The question isn't whether or not you'd get the same line count with a non-LLM tool. The question of whether or not it's vibe-coded depends on whether or not the committer actually reviewed and understood the new code. And with a 75k line difference, that seems unlikely. |
| |
| ▲ | heddhunter 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Just another Monday in 2026. | |
| ▲ | vips7L 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The blind leading the blind. | |
| ▲ | geodel 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm sure it will be called Systems Programing . Because Rust. | | |
| |
| ▲ | MarsIronPI 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It depends on what you mean by "vibe coding". Is AI coding based on an existing implementation vibe coding? What about only from a natural-language spec? How does manual reviewing affect whether or not it's vibe coding? | |
| ▲ | lmm 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In practice all use of AI rapidly becomes vibe coding. Even if someone says they're going to carefully manually review everything that's generated, within a couple of days they get bored and just click approve. | | |
| ▲ | jmull 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | While I'm sure you're speaking for many, this is definitely not true across the board. | |
| ▲ | markatto 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is just a matter of priorities - I use LLMs to write code every day and I have never put a single line of code up for review that I didn’t read and understand. | | |
| ▲ | pineapple_opus an hour ago | parent [-] | | I use to do this and then do test manually to validate everything works as expected in my small open source project. But then over the time I saw that some bugs crept in which I was unable track since I was doing manual testing. So I wrote some e2e tests with playwright and I think that gives a bit relief (at least). |
| |
| ▲ | p-e-w 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not to mention that manually writing code is itself a process of understanding. It cannot be replicated by reading code, no matter how carefully. | |
| ▲ | smohare 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
|
|
|
| ▲ | splittydev 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Honestly, this kind of thing seems to work quite well with vibe coding. If I remember correctly, the Ladybird JS engine was "vibe-ported" to Rust as well, and it passed 100% of the original test suite, in addition to new Rust tests. |
|
| ▲ | pstuart 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Porting from one typed language to another seems like a perfect use for LLMs. I can see the appeal of both languages and why to consider such an action (e.g., rust is a mainstream PL vs zig's cult status (no slight intended)). |
| |
| ▲ | rtpg 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think the big difficulty here is that Rust's ownership model in particular tends to require certain kinds of control flow to avoid a bunch of weird churning/copying, which makes it not as straightforward of a port target from other imperative languages. Like maybe you get the LLM to try _really hard_ to churn through everything, but this feels like a big case of "perils of the lack of laziness". Of course if you have a good idea for how to deal with allocations etc "idiomatically" already maybe that works out well. And to the credit of the port guide writer bun seems to have its explicit allocations that are already mapping pretty well to Rust. | | |
| ▲ | pstuart 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is all wild conjecture, but I'd assume that teaching the LLM to do that mapping is an achievable goal and then it get's close to automatic -- effectively slurp the source AST into a rust AST and render. My only experience with ports so far is Python to Go, and it's been near flawless (just enough stupid shit to make me feel justified to be in the loop). | | |
| ▲ | rtpg 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It really isn't if you don't have the right abstractions. Especially for memory management the right and wrong abstractions in Rust can lead to a factor of 5 or 10 extra amount of difficulty. The right memory management abstraction and your code can be a straight line port (or even cleaner!), the wrong one and you're going to just be spending a lot of tokens to have a machine spin around in circles trying to untie itself GC'd languages don't have this problem, though obviously you can still generate stupid amount of pain for yourself by doing something wrong | |
| ▲ | spem-in-allium 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm porting a large-ish delphi application to c sharp. It's been pretty hands-off except for converting to async and some language capability mismatch. |
|
|
|