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Posted by tosh 7 hours ago

Zig: Build System Reworked(ziglang.org)
206 points | 111 commentspage 2
abhayji 5 hours ago|
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baskduf 7 hours ago||
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lerp-io 5 hours ago||
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KingMob 5 hours ago||
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alkyon 4 hours ago|
Carpentry would have been ideal career. Building real things, artisanal or not, and nobody insisting yet that the chest of drawers you're building include AI
KingMob 4 hours ago||
Of course, the flip side is, modern construction isn't done with artisanal woodworking techniques.

I'm not even thinking of AI, but Rust. I guess I'm just uninterested in a "modern C".

xtreak29 4 hours ago|
Bun is moving towards rust but does this also help bun's compilation times?

https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-s-zig-fork-got-4x-faster-compilatio...

androiddrew 3 hours ago||
I think bun is moving to rust because Anthropic owns it and the devs there like rust. So why would they invest in another implementation? Sad to see a good zig example go, but as soon as Anthropic bought it I wrote the project off.
xorgun 3 hours ago|||
[dead]
pylotlight 2 hours ago|||
Just plain incorrect.. please stop spouting this nonsense, this is not the reason whatsoever.
amazingamazing 2 hours ago||
What is the reason?
insanitybit 51 minutes ago|||
The explicitly stated reason is that they ran into too many segfaults and it was slowing down development velocity.

That said, I hope that Zig posts won't be plagued by "but the bun thing" like this in the near future.

galangalalgol 2 hours ago|||
I am not aure either, but bun wasn't using normal zig and there was drama about upstreaming. Combine that with anthropics desire to show they can help rewrite everything in rust and that probably accounts for some of it.
kristoff_it 2 hours ago|||
Bun has de-facto refused to use incremental compilation in Zig for ages. It got to the point where Jarred somehow seems to have forgotten that the feature exists.

In any case Bun has already committed to the Rust slop switch, so it doesn't matter anymore.

teabee89 1 hour ago|||
Somebody should revive the zig version of bun and call it banh as in the vietnamese banh mi sandwich :)
ulbu 3 hours ago||
bun seems to be committed to slop rust already. so, with their ethic, maybe we should just disassociate them from zig and let them go realize their slop dreams?

zig is on its way to improving compilation times in its own pace and does so for the benefit of the project and everyone involved, so what is left to care for about bun by anthropic’s past?

NewsaHackO 2 hours ago|||
> bun seems to be committed to slop rust already. so, with their ethic, maybe we should just disassociate them from zig and let them go realize their slop dreams?

Closing your eyes and pretending a problem does not exist is the a good solution. The fact of the matter is one of the biggest projects that used Zig thought that the devX was so bad that they opted to rewrite their entire 1M LOC project into a different language. This is a nightmare scenario for most companies, and will motivate similar sized companies/project to pick another language that will not require this than to risk using Zig. Also, Zig’s flippant attitude about Bun’s request (among other viewpoints) only further adds to why bigger projects would want to stay away from Zig.

kllrnohj 1 hour ago|||
> The fact of the matter is one of the biggest projects that used Zig thought that the devX was so bad

It's unlikely to be just a devex issue. The fact of the matter is that a memory unsafe language is an extremely tough sell today, and companies that have a security team at all have likely already made or are planning on making policies like https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...

There's a reason "rewrite it in Rust" was a meme long before LLM coding tools or this Bun drama. With AI accelerated fuzzing techniques and similar, memory safety is rapidly going to become a basic requirement of anything run in a production environment.

Philpax 42 minutes ago||
I would argue that memory safety is part of devex: it's just one less thing you have to be constantly vigilant about.
geodel 1 hour ago||||
> The fact of the matter is one of the biggest projects that used Zig thought that the devX was so bad that they opted to rewrite their entire 1M LOC project into a different language.

That is not the fact of matter. The fact is it got bought by Anthropic. And in larger scheme of things Bun is one example Claude capabilities of translation. And even if doesn't work, it just a part of Claude desktop stack so still have millions of installs.

NewsaHackO 45 minutes ago||
Not really, if it doesn’t work then it will hurt their flagship desktop app’s stability, which would negatively affect their placing in an already cutthroat AI arms. Claude Code is the few business asset that Claude has the least moat compared to other providers( even open source). They can’t afford to be sloppy and use a buggy JS engine.
araoz 1 hour ago|||
I don't remember where it was said first, but I think the problem was not "AI drama" or that zig doesn't have "a good solution". It was more a mismatch between Bun's & Zig's goals. Bun wants to move fast & break things, even more now after getting acquired, but Zig punishes that. Zig requires you to handle everything carefully, there's no GC or big runtime to let you "break things", zig will let you just segfault.

Companies like TigerBeetle can and will benefit from zig's model.

NewsaHackO 59 minutes ago||
But this goes to my second point; it seems like Zig wasn’t open to any compromise about the solution that Bun submitted and one they built in house. Is it the Zig culture to reject a pull request like that wholesale? It’s really odd for them to have such a flippant attitude and not to even try offer ways that they could use the pull request or things that they need to tweak to make it more inline with what they want. Companies want to use languages that have a understanding committee, and are willing to work together to create solutions, not just say “No, this isn’t what we want, and we are building a similar system anyway so don’t even bother to try again”. It just looks unprofessional.
jgalt212 2 hours ago|||
I bet they'll ultimately reverse course on this, or the there will be a bun / zig fork becomes the de facto bun. Despite what the influencers say, I'm convinced you cannot vibe code a conversion this big. It will need a ton of human intervention. And for brand narrative reasons, Anthropic won't commit to such a path.
galangalalgol 2 hours ago||
It depends on how thorough the test infrastructure is I think. Something like curl with its immaculate tests could probably get autonomously ported if you threw infinite tokens at it because you have deterministically defined what finished looks like. But I think you are likely right in this case.