Imagine you want to monopolize programming by pushing LLM as an obligatory middle-men. Then people who can program without LLMs are direct threat to your business plan. It's time for us to start hiding. I'm cosidering adding `co-authored by Claude Code` to my hand-written commits and running Claude in useless loops to mock API usage.
Even if the translation was free and into ideal idiomatic Rust (and it's obviously not - it's now Zig with Rust syntax) then this would be churn for the sake of churn.
At some project scale the language really stops being any limiting factor, and you're instead mostly dealing with working past past architectural decisions, integration of large changes, deep optimization, steering the codebase into alignment with project roadmaps and long-term goals, regression testing as features get introduced, maintenance of multiple release trains... Experienced software engineers mostly stop caring about simple things like the programming language choice at that point, because whatever issues come from that choice have already been resolved. What matters is stability, careful orchestration of large changes and a stable and comprehensive test suite.
That's not entirely true. At a certain scale, some languages start becoming increasingly more of a factor. Memory issues in C/C++ codebases, for example. This is pretty well established at this point, which is why there's a push to move away from memory-unsafe languages. Which likely would include Zig, for better or worse.
What if there isn't much cost? What if the benefits outweigh the cost?
So now imagine your company and project -- written in Zig -- has just been acquired by the world's biggest/second-biggest AI company.
That company's most successful and popular tool is running on your platform that is written Zig.
And Zig maintainers want nothing to do with you.
What kind of pressures, real or imagined, do you think that puts on the developers of Bun?
Honestly, from what I've seen from a distance, actual rigorous software engineering doesn't happen at Anthropic. From what we saw of the Claude Code source, the reliability issues over the last few months, and now this. It's just a bunch of people getting high on their own supply falling all over each other. Quality issues galore and a delirious frenzy.
FWIW I don't think it's intrinsic to AI. Codex is very well written (in Rust, BTW), fast, and consistent.
Not that only idiomatic Rust is appropriate.
That being said, "idiomatic" is more just saying "clean and familiar". It's using the right language features in the right places.
For example, you could write something like this
fn add_double(a: f64, b: f64) -> f64 {
return a + b;
}
fn add_float(a: f32, b: f32) -> f32 {
return a + b;
}
fn add<T: std::ops::Add<Output = T>>(a: T, b: T) -> T {
return a + b;
}
The first method is what you might write if you were, for example, translating from C to Rust. It isn't idiomatic but it's easy to do.
The other thing to realize is that compiler authors optimize for idiomatic. The more you do things in a strange fashion, the more likely you are to stumble over a way of writing code which isn't being looked at when the language team is looking at performance and compile time optimizations.
There's nothing wrong with non-idiomatic code per say. However, part of learning a language is learning the idioms. It makes you better at that language.
fn add<T: std::ops::Add<Output = T>>(a: T, b: T) -> T {
a + b
}Imagine if you translated assembly to C++, but you just did it by putting everything in `asm("...")` calls. That's not idiomatic C++ and you wouldn't get any of the benefits of using C++.
That said, the Rust code I skimmed actually did look surprisingly idiomatic. It wasn't full of `unsafe` like I would have expected.
The people making Zig have said they don't want that.
> Code origin was not even a factor [0]
> AI is entirely besides the point here. The changes in this Zig fork are not desirable to upstream for several reasons. [1]
So my view here is that besides AI policies to filter low value contributions and "contributor poker" [2] to attract contributors vs just contributions, a well thought of genious implementation aligned with the Zig roadmap instead of the "hacky implementation for a flashy headline" [1] would have made the cut.
But then again this entertaining drama will sadly get deprecated by mid 2027 as the datacenters will be churning out their own opusrust and clankzig.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48017255
[1] https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-s-zig-fork-got-4x-faster-compilatio...