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Posted by tomlockwood 11 hours ago

How is the Bun Rewrite in Rust going?(lockwood.dev)
406 points | 313 commentspage 3
nickcw 9 hours ago|
Maybe it would have made more sense for Anthropic to rewrite Claude Code in rust, and cut out the middle man (bun)?
leobuskin 9 hours ago|
Nope, they want shared artifact(s) between web and desktop (not sure what do they have in mobile apps) clients (Chat/Cowork/Code/CC-cli), so TS is the way to go. It’s a reasonable choice made by engineers.
JackSlateur 6 hours ago|||
Pretty sure rust can run on browsers;
throwaway613746 5 hours ago|||
[dead]
internet2000 10 hours ago||
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.

joks 9 hours ago||
It's not "done" if it's not stable and released. It's being canary tested by Claude Code users essentially but it's still being heavily worked on with tons of $ being poured into it and there's still no sign of them considering it stable and ready to go. That's the point of the article.
skydhash 9 hours ago||
> and being used in a massive product already?

One single product, AFAIK, and one ladden with bugs and issue too.

simonw 8 hours ago||
One metric I thought might be interesting with respect to the Rust rewrite is the number of "unsafe" occurrences in the code.

I was optimistic those would be going down over time but it looks like they've stayed pretty constant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48966569#48967630

pohl 7 hours ago|
Does that data exclude FFI wrappers, which necessarily must be unsafe? If not, don’t put much stock in it.
simonw 7 hours ago||
No, it's a raw count.

I get that there's a baseline of unsafe that's necessary, but I was under the impression that some of those unsafes were in places where they could be replaced by more idiomatic Rust at a later date.

tomlockwood 7 hours ago||
I don't think that's true. I think a fair chunk of them are places where Bun is handed a pointer by WebKit or something similar. I believe they write about this a little.
insanitybit 6 hours ago||
I think there's a reasonable expectation that unsafe could still be reduced by having shared, safer abstractions - that would lead to fewer `unsafe` results because the `unsafe` would be contained. I'm surprised that this isn't a higher priority target for them.
yearesadpeople 10 hours ago||
> _"...Canny..."_

What a time to be alive

nchmy 9 hours ago||
Came to point this out as well. Very bizarre that it was capitalized. Italics or bold might even have been acceptable...
rob74 10 hours ago|||
Yeah, I noticed that too and kept wondering who this Canny was that the author wants to be? Felt a bit un-Canny...
tomlockwood 10 hours ago||
More proof that it was written by a human!!!
whobre 9 hours ago||
Still have no idea what that means…
arcwhite 9 hours ago||
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/canny

It means shrewd.

E.g. we should keep our wits about us when someone is making big hyperbolic claims about LLM that they directly benefit from, because maybe they have a motive to mislead either themselves, or us

knighthacker 4 hours ago||
There's probably a ton of intangible factors to this, but how do you measure the ROI on this?
mawadev 9 hours ago||
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!
ifwinterco 9 hours ago||
Something about bun always rubbed me up the wrong way (I even hate the name), but I couldn't really explain why.

Thankfully now I have some good material to post-rationalise my intuitive dislike

podgorniy 9 hours ago||
Mechanisms of beliefs, sense of identity and pride are behind of majority of projects including opensource. These are the same mechanisms which produce what you call "drama".

We can't have commited and involved people working on opensource stuff and simultaneously avoid drama when their sence of identity/beliefs/pride is devalued.

jadar 3 hours ago||
This doesn't answer the question it asks.
amazingamazing 10 hours ago||
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
jeltz 10 hours ago||
They bought the maintainers, not the code.
amazingamazing 9 hours ago||
Why though? Isn't AI supposed to take care of such things?
atonse 7 hours ago||
Because even when the AI is really good at writing code, you still have to know what to ask it, how to direct it, have product taste, etc.

Otherwise all of us would just be able to build bun via a prompt.

quikoa 10 hours ago|||
To me it just looks like a marketing stunt.
vortegne 10 hours ago||
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.

jeltz 10 hours ago||
It was expected. These LLM rewrites seem to work amazingly at first and then you realize there is a ton of work remaining.
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