Yeah same, according to one of the Zig team members, the original source code wasn't all that anyway.

But this is HN, a subsection of which places a high importance on what language something is written in, moreso than what it does (feels like).

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flohofwoe a day ago | parent | next [-]

An interesting tidbit is that large parts of the original Bun source code was a line-by-line port of esbuild from Go to Zig (mentioned here: https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust), tbh this lowered my respect for the project a bit (a line-by-line port simply isn't as interesting as original work), and it might also explain the subpar Zig code quality (a line-by-line port from Go to Zig simply won't result in idiomatic Zig). It also might explain why porting from Zig to Rust was done 'on a whim', the actual source code (and the idea of 'original work') never seemed to be all that important to the author (and I wouldn't be surprised if the project does more language-hopping in the future heh).

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realo a day ago | parent [-]

I read your link, written by Bun's author and totally get his thinking.

In the current world of cyber weaknesses everywhere, infrastructure must be solid and rust is a better choice than zig for something like bun.

In other words, bun is not a demo of zig programming that happens to do useful things. Bun does useful things, and must do them securely. That is its number one priority, language is secondary, inasmuch as it helps doing useful things securely.

	▲	ambicapter a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Are you really "doing things securely" when you use as many unsafe blocks as the Rust port of Bun does?
	▲	LtWorf 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don't think you can claim your code is secure, or can claim anything at all about your code, if you haven't written the code and have no idea what's in there. Rust protects against a rather small group of memory error, if and only if the unsafe sections are actually correct. And nobody knows if they are correct or not, plus there can be millions of logical errors that can be exploited. See how many CVEs uutils has… quite a lot for a supposedly secure rewrite of GNU coreutils.

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gipp a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't think the GP had anything to do with the language change itself. More that it marks a clear point of Anthropic taking ownership and governance of the project in a less open direction.