Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why?
Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen.
Battle-tested, mature code > fresh rewrite.
Existing Zig codebase has seen X amount of battle-testing. Rust rewrite: 0 (except -I'm assuming- passing test suites). Also:
"this was a port to unsafe Rust, allowing a literal file-by-file migration to minimize risk"
How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with?
Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something. As it is, the impressive bit is do such a big rewrite & result seems to work ok. Are Bun users happy with this?
To me it reads like Bun was forked. Will the Zig version survive? Will the Rust one? Both? All options ok.
Edit: and fwiw, I don't think Zig community should get triggered on any of this. It says nothing about how suitable Zig is or isn't for project xyz, and Zig community is big enough to carry their own project & applications besides Bun.
RetroTechie
I think like most people, I don’t have a problem with Andrew “calling a spade a spade,” even if I find his reasoning motivated. The bigger problem with the post is that it talks out of both ends of the mouth: it’s clearly meant as a personal attack, but also insists that it isn’t.
When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad, might subject me to this kind of article from their BDFL. I can’t conceive of the leadership of the Python or Rust or any other community I’ve ever worked with doing something like that.
woodruffw
I stand with Andrew.
As someone who's been following Sumner's work closely for years, Kelley's accusations are very much true even if unkind. While the results are useful and cool, it a wankfluencer op from start to finish. I dare you to refute thus.
And I say all this as someone who does agentic development 8hrs a day and someone who always pestered my team to opt for Rust and Deno instead of Node. Call a spade a spade, the rewrite was poorly justified and one in a long lines of successful psyops Dario and co. cooked and delivered.
Now, would Andrew's message have been better received if it had better "decorum"? Maybe. But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts. You have to appreciate that.
cropcirclbureau
Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks.
For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.
vlaaad
What I have been missing in all this debate is substance. I don't care that Bun was ported to Rust; I don't care that Andrew wrote a hit piece about it; I don't care that Anthropic sells shovels in the gold rush.
What I do care about is technical details. Jared shared some motivation as to why they ported to Rust, and I think they look valid (even if provided with sparse evidence). But I have not seen any sort of refutation from Andrew that these are not actually issues or how they should be solved in Zig canonically. I'd really like to see an exploration of these arguments, specifically pertaining to the Zig code as it was written for Bun.
jonkoops
I agree with some of Kelley’s takes, but the issue is the tone.
Does anyone think that if Bun had been rewritten from Rust to Zig that a member of the Rust core team would have written a personal hit piece against Sumner (while pretending it isn’t a hit piece)? Probably not.
Kelley can write what he wants, but as the BDFL of a rising programming language, people are allowed to react if they don’t agree with the public image being portrayed by Zig.
jswny
> Management eagerly approved the Rust rewrite option because it was a great marketing opportunity to showcase their new Fable model, Anthropic already uses Rust, and Zig is openly against using Anthropic’s products.
Yeah, don't discount how powerful "marketing" is to management/executives, and also don't discount how absolutely ridiculously petty people can be, especially people who end up like CEOs and similar, requires a particular person. I can definitively see reason #1 and #3 from that to basically already set in stone that Bun had to be rewritten in Rust.
embedding-shape
Thank you. I was left confused after people praised the Bun to Rust blog post eventhough it contained very actual technical substance. No clear evaluation of options, very biased report on impact, missing figures. It absolutely didn't feel like an engineering blog post.
Maybe people were more interested in the agentic part more than the actual rationale for the port in the first place, because it was very disappointing from a technical standpoint.
simjnd
Why are we even discussing stuff like work hour expectations in a story about language switch drama?
Even if the guy is a terrible manager this still comes across as a determined attempt to find something negative to say.
To me it’s telling how little focus there is on the technical merits of the rewrite from zig side. Anthropic claimed a bunch of victories and as best as I can tell nobody has even attempted to refute them.
If I was running a project and someone threw it into an LLM rewrite and it comes out with improvements and silence on downsides I’d be pretty worried and try to address that. Instead we’re talking about working hours somehow
Havoc
I really don't understand what Andrew Kelly hopes to achieve here. Even the non-programmers at r/programming who usually piles on any type of anti-AI posts called it out.
I'm trying to not let this affect my thoughts about Zig as a language but it's hard.
comments (10)
Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why?
Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen.
Battle-tested, mature code > fresh rewrite.
Existing Zig codebase has seen X amount of battle-testing. Rust rewrite: 0 (except -I'm assuming- passing test suites). Also:
"this was a port to unsafe Rust, allowing a literal file-by-file migration to minimize risk"
How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with?
Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something. As it is, the impressive bit is do such a big rewrite & result seems to work ok. Are Bun users happy with this?
To me it reads like Bun was forked. Will the Zig version survive? Will the Rust one? Both? All options ok.
Edit: and fwiw, I don't think Zig community should get triggered on any of this. It says nothing about how suitable Zig is or isn't for project xyz, and Zig community is big enough to carry their own project & applications besides Bun.
RetroTechie
When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad, might subject me to this kind of article from their BDFL. I can’t conceive of the leadership of the Python or Rust or any other community I’ve ever worked with doing something like that.
woodruffw
As someone who's been following Sumner's work closely for years, Kelley's accusations are very much true even if unkind. While the results are useful and cool, it a wankfluencer op from start to finish. I dare you to refute thus.
And I say all this as someone who does agentic development 8hrs a day and someone who always pestered my team to opt for Rust and Deno instead of Node. Call a spade a spade, the rewrite was poorly justified and one in a long lines of successful psyops Dario and co. cooked and delivered.
Now, would Andrew's message have been better received if it had better "decorum"? Maybe. But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts. You have to appreciate that.
cropcirclbureau
For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.
vlaaad
What I do care about is technical details. Jared shared some motivation as to why they ported to Rust, and I think they look valid (even if provided with sparse evidence). But I have not seen any sort of refutation from Andrew that these are not actually issues or how they should be solved in Zig canonically. I'd really like to see an exploration of these arguments, specifically pertaining to the Zig code as it was written for Bun.
jonkoops
Does anyone think that if Bun had been rewritten from Rust to Zig that a member of the Rust core team would have written a personal hit piece against Sumner (while pretending it isn’t a hit piece)? Probably not.
Kelley can write what he wants, but as the BDFL of a rising programming language, people are allowed to react if they don’t agree with the public image being portrayed by Zig.
jswny
Yeah, don't discount how powerful "marketing" is to management/executives, and also don't discount how absolutely ridiculously petty people can be, especially people who end up like CEOs and similar, requires a particular person. I can definitively see reason #1 and #3 from that to basically already set in stone that Bun had to be rewritten in Rust.
embedding-shape
Maybe people were more interested in the agentic part more than the actual rationale for the port in the first place, because it was very disappointing from a technical standpoint.
simjnd
Even if the guy is a terrible manager this still comes across as a determined attempt to find something negative to say.
To me it’s telling how little focus there is on the technical merits of the rewrite from zig side. Anthropic claimed a bunch of victories and as best as I can tell nobody has even attempted to refute them.
If I was running a project and someone threw it into an LLM rewrite and it comes out with improvements and silence on downsides I’d be pretty worried and try to address that. Instead we’re talking about working hours somehow
Havoc
I'm trying to not let this affect my thoughts about Zig as a language but it's hard.
Kiro