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Personally I don't care that they used AI to rewrite Bun to Rust. Even if 1.4 is not good enough it will probably get better over time.

What has pushed me back to Node is seeing how amateurish the transition has been handled.

- No LTS support for the Zig version regarding CVEs etc.

- Huge bugs like the 3MB memory leak mentioned in the blog post abandoned in the Zig version to basically force people into the Rust version to fix their apps in production.

- Zero involvement with the Bun community about such a major decision. One day it was "stop the drama I'm just playing with this" and a couple of days later "yolo merged to main".

Jarred basically keeps operating as if he was a lone hacker working on his personal project.

7 comments

> Zero involvement with the Bun community

Yeah. The human aspect of the transition was just incredibly bad. The person behind Bun has just demonstrated how much he values the community.

But I'm sure he will build another community around this rewrite. After all, there is an abundance of people cheering "Rust rewrites".

Until the new favorite language comes up.

1.4 has no breaking changes from 1.3 so why would there be an LTS and any guarantees for people staying on 1.3? All known regressions have been fixed like any other release as far as I can tell

Paying customers get LTS. Are any paying customers asking for a Zig branch LTS? Or are you expecting open source maintainers to do free work for no particular reason?

Java, Node, and .NET have LTS versions all of which are free to use.

> Or are you expecting open source maintainers to do free work for no particular reason?

Free work? Last I heard Anthropic had acquired Bun.

Getting to an LTS release train of bun is probably a good idea, assuming they are still interested in external adoption rates. They shipped 1.0 a little under 3 years ago and the acquisition has had ~6 months to get settled. Looking at an LTS release would enable a lot of the more slower moving places to look at bun within being worried about getting caught up in the velocity.

I don't know it makes sense to try to make the an LTS version of where the Zig version left off, particularly if they know they are shipping a different solution & codebase to tackle the bulk of their security and memory bugs. Let this settle a few more months with the intent of releasing an LTS of it by the end of the year, if there really is demand for it. All of the benefits of having an LTS version like Java, Node, and .NET without needing to jump to a pre-port version of the codebase which was never targeted to be a good version to LTS in the first place.

A final Zig-based LTS would have made great sense if LTS releases had already been in the picture though.

> assuming they are still interested in external adoption rates.

If they are not it would be a good reason to move away from it.

So not just free work, but you expect Anthropic to pay to maintain a Zig version...?

I don’t follow how it would be in Anthropic’s interests to maintain an LTS version of Bun. It seems unlikely they’d use it, and it would cost them money (in the form of labor).

To my understanding, Java and .NET offer public LTSes because they’re financially buoyed by huge companies using those LTS versions, and Oracle and Microsoft are fundamentally selling that LTS support as a product. I have no idea why Node does, maybe it’s similar. But Bun’s position appears to be different than all three.

Are you asking for an LTS Zig version as a member of Anthropic?

> - No LTS support for the Zig version regarding CVEs etc.

Every release would have tons of CVEs and would take so much effort. E.g. the example from blog with memory issues. Better just think that Zig version was not there what comes to security. Use at your own risk.

> Jarred basically keeps operating as if he was a lone hacker working on his personal project.

They have right to do it, however. It is expected, especially if company owns it.

Of course he has the right to do it, no one disputes that. The users and community also have the right to complain, or stop using and supporting Bun because they don't like his actions

LTS is more relevant if there was any kind of compatibility that was broken. They still haven’t released 1.4 even though it seems to have gone extremely well by every metric in the wild, with tons of people using Claude code with no regressions in a month. Nothing to me suggests they’re being careless here.

In fact, he had two adversarial reviewer Claude instances on every code change, every line. I don’t know a single human team that does two independent reviews of every line, except maybe the people that wrote space shuttle software.

Also they fixed the memory leak. How does it matter what language it’s written in? At the end of the day, people use it to run their typescript code among other things.

How many bun users care that’s it’s written in zig? I certainly don’t. I’ve been using bun for 2 years and I think I looked up zig once. It’s just not relevant.

Did it get more stable? Yes. Slimmer? Yes. More performant? Yes. Is there any proof that it got LESS secure? No. The code has been out for two months. By now all the nay sayers would’ve found the smoking gun. They haven’t. How much more proof would you like that this was a resounding success?

This is our new reality. The agents are so good that projects like this are in the realm of possible. That’s exciting.

> LTS is more relevant if there was any kind of compatibility that was broken

Do we know 100% for certain that this isn't the case? No.

In fact it would be naive to think a rewrite of this magnitude wouldn't introduce new bugs and/or unexpected changes in behavior.

> Nothing to me suggests they’re being careless here.

Plenty of reasons suggest this including the lack of an LTS or any kind of thought put into such a massive transition.

Again, the code’s been out for two months. And by many accounts, many people would clearly love to scream loudly about all the things that broke.

There were initial analyses done on the port. And things continue to get refactored. But is there any slam dunk article where someone actually found any regression in functionality or stability? We’re seeing the opposite. Dozens of bugs fixed. We don’t have to theorize. They’ve been running this experiment for 2 months, with all the code out in the open.

It just feels like after two months, people want to cling to the _idea_ that this was reckless, without evidence of any meaningful negative impact.

I have a few opinions on this:

1) My (and possibly other people's) last impression of this was when it was merged just based on all tests passing. In many projects, relying just on tests would definitely be reckless (not sure about coverage/quality of Bun tests).

I didn't follow much what where they doing later, maybe it is indeed good enough. For example, Claude Code using it and being fine is reassuring.

2) Making such a big decision that quickly and not (even having the time to) consulting community doesn't really inspire confidence.

3) You can be reckless even if everything ends up being perfect in the end.

Going 80mph in a city, you probably have like 80% chance of not crashing. And if you don't crash, you just had a much faster and more fun trip. Doesn't mean it wasn't reckless.

> You can be reckless even if everything ends up being perfect in the end.

This. Something I expect any person who think they are "engineer" to understand without thinking.

> One day it was "stop the drama I'm just playing with this" and a couple of days later "yolo merged to main".

Yeah, that was beyond ridiculous.

this reminded me of WoW classics: Leeroy Jenkins

yolo!!!