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Comments (154)

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  SquareWheel
  I'm not sure how much insight we can glean from looking at the number of commits and release cadence here. In the aftermath of such a major refactor/rewrite, I would expect it to take some time to get back up to their usual development speed.Jared and the other developers are new to the Rust codebase, even if the structure is largely familiar. They're also likely focusing on other priorities right now such as tracking down instances of 'unsafe', rather than making user-facing changes (which might encourage a release).Bugfixes could encourage rapid new releases, but perhaps the rewrite simply hasn't been very buggy? As far as I know, those on the canary channel haven't reported any major issues, or even really noticed the change. So perhaps there's little reason for new releases right now, as the team slowly churns through the backlog.> P.S. Anthropic’s C compiler and Cursor’s FastRender web browser haven’t had any commits for months.I always assumed those were just experiments in capability, and weren't meant to be ongoing projects. I would hope that nobody is using them directly today.
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  Jarred
  Bun’s Rust rewrite shipped in Claude Code over a month ago and barely anyone noticed. Claude Code is widely used. The Rust rewrite is going well overall.In the Bun v1.4 video, I promised a certain number of newly passing Node.js tests were added to force us to improve compatibility, and that number is not true yet. The release is delayed until it is true. The PRs to make it true are up but not merged yet. Most likely next Tuesday we’ll do the release of 1.4.
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  benjiro29
  I really do not understand how software developer think anymore. Using a LLM to translate a project in a short time, is by itself incredible. Just like one-shot whatever office clone.But what makes software is not the fast creation of a "product" but that actual development of its features. Figuring out how everything needs to work together, fixing the bugs, and the o so boring UI work.I have used LLMs to create stuff like word clones just for fun. It was a disaster. Sure, it had the basic functionality. But the moment you started with page structure (harder then one non-stop scrolling page), tables, images, rotating, and so many details that make up just the basics of word. Not even the extended functionality. You see every LLM just fall on its face.Sure, i can clone sqlite from c to rust. Hell, i may even get it to do all the tests 100%. But there is a 99% chance that the clone will be slower, as it lacks the years of optimizations from the original language. There will be new bugs because of the language changeover. There is a need for future support and fixes.People threat software like its something it is not. But unlike the past where your clients question your sanity for charging 100k for a piece of software. Not understanding its not just about writing the code. Now those expectation are even more pushed forwards, because of articles like this.I constantly see software being published on reddit that does X, Y, Z only for the authors to abandon it as fast as they vibe coded it. Because fixing bugs is NOT sexy. Even with a LLM at your fingertips. Dealing with nagging users, is not sexy. Dealing with security issues, is NOT sexy. Dealing with data structure / databases, especially as your system changes ... you get the point.Not understanding to the core the software you wrote, is going to exploded in your face.This is why these stupid "we rewrote X into Z with a LLM in Y days" mean nothing. Its one thing to get a head start using this trick, its another to actually learn the code of your rewrite. And dedicated the time into maintaining the port, growing it, fixing it. This is where a lot of software fails. But now this crap is out there, instead of the maintained version of Zig, now we have a unmaintained Rust version that clouded the airwaves because if people now search for it, those articles "X in Z days" will pop up.What have we become ...
• simonw
  This article could increase its credibility by being updated to acknowledge that Bun-on-Rust has been live in Claude Code itself since June 17th, and available as a canary release since it landed on main.Rewrites of this scale certainly justify long canary release periods!
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  abalashov
  I did suspect that the triumphalist pronouncements, and even the seemingly honest and forthright deep dive, were a little premature.This is a key problem with LLM exuberance: it's very tempting to trade on decades of experience in software using LLMs, because one is tired of typing and manual figuring-out, it seems to work if you're competent, and the payoff is essentially immediate. The real bill comes in the mail much later.
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  losvedir
  I'm not sure Anthropic even cares about "releasing" the next version. The rust one has been in use in Claude Code for more than a month now, used by millions of people, and that's as far as they probably really worry about it. They bought Bun for Claude Code and I doubt the open source project matters to them otherwise.
• pu_pe
  I am fascinated by the discourse around this Bun rewrite. I read a lot of drama and personal accusations, there are pieces like this one trying to extract clues, and it seems everyone has a deeper ideological concern behind whatever they are trying to say. For this article, it seems to be skepticism towards AI and how successful it can be at replacing programmers. Other takes, like the one from the Zig maintainer, were also along those lines but more about the open source ethics and the future of that in a LLM world.I am mostly bullish on AI capabilities, so from my perspective I don't see why we should be skeptical that frontier LLMs guided by experienced devs can translate whole libraries like that. Good follow-up questions would be how expensive it currently is to do so, and whether we will see people branching into all-in on AI versus no-AI camps as happened in this case.
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  CrzyLngPwd
  Just a couple more 100hr weeks of debugging, and the last 80% will be done :-)
• xiphias2
  Everybody who has rewritten software understands the current phase: it mostly works, but there are always things to fix to make sure that there are no regressions, and the pressure is huge for any release.I still believe it was the good decision, but I also know that I wouldn't be the first person to run the release in prod.I think Jarred should start making release candidates instead of releases to take some of the pressure off.
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  reliabilityguy
  Many repeat the point of “$165k is cheaper than team of multiple engineers working on the rewrite for a year”, which I think is flawed — the team of engineers would have produced idiomatic rust, and it would take probably 100k+ of tokens more to make the bun in rust idiomatic rust.
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  podgorniy
  > I hadn’t seen the numbers for the CI/CD costs of Buildkite, and as you might have noticed from above, some PRs were written by Anthropic employees.The leaked code of the claude had switch flag where claude pretends to be employee. You can't trust/expect that those PR's were authored by people.
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  muglug
  This post doesn’t make sense. It was rewritten in Rust. The rewrite itself is complete (no more Zig).Various people have claimed that Bun in Zig had a lot of tech debt. If they’re to be believed, it seems natural to assume the rewrite does, too. Perhaps all this activity is paying down some of that debt.
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  yearesadpeople
  > _"...Canny..."_What a time to be alive
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  amazingamazing
  Why did they buy an open source project anyway? If is not “officially” supported why not fork and use? Claude code is probably the most used anyway
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  nickcw
  Maybe it would have made more sense for Anthropic to rewrite Claude Code in rust, and cut out the middle man (bun)?
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  mawadev
  I'm gonna say it bluntly: I don't care about bun, never cared about bun and think nodejs is sufficient. The drama surrounding zig and rust still leaves me with a bad taste because I also don't like how nonsensical topics like that influence what we do and what we (have to) care about on a day to day basis. That is just my opinion!
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  internet2000
  I don't get it. Because they haven't cut a new arbitrary version number, we're denying it got done (in their perspective) and being used in a massive product already?If you're being pedantic, no it's not "done," but nothing ever is.
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  vortegne
  I didn't follow the thing too closely when it happened. Sure, I was aware of the big picture. But wow, I didn't expect that after all this noise there still hasn't been a release? That's just crazy to me.I shouldn't be surprised though, of course. Giving any credit or slack to a high-valuation LLM company is a silly endeavor.
• anon
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• qarl2
  Coincidentally - I'm trying to get feedback on my own rewrite project - MAME ROM machine code to Idiomatic JavaScript - but sadly HN is hiding my post... :(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49069383EDIT: I'd love to hear why I'm downvoted.
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  luciana1u
  the author wrote a whole blog post asking how the bun rewrite is going and the answer from the thread is: nobody knows, including the author
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  IshKebab
  This doesn't answer the question posed in the title unfortunately. I am none the wiser about how it's going. The author just speculates that the rewrite isn't actually complete.
• anon
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  tomlockwood
  Author here: An apology on the graphs, they just count rust files touched in commits, not total commits. So if there were two commits and one touched 3 .rs files and another touched 2, it'd be counted as 5 for the purposes of the graphs. I may fix this later but, yeah.
• khanhnguyen8386
  [dead]
• z0ltan
  [dead]
• anon
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  brap
  If you’ve ever worked at a tech company you already know the answer without reading any further
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  Xenoamorphous
  > we’re approaching $800k in money spent on this rewrite.That’s peanuts, if not the shells of the peanuts, for a project and company of this magnitude