[delayed]

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.

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.

Where is a source for either of these extraordinary claims?

Anthropic only acquired Bun in December of last year. They weren't there in the first place, to make the decision.

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.

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.

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?

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!