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> 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.

by NewsaHackO2 hours ago|

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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.

by kllrnohj3 hours ago|

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> 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.

by Philpax2 hours ago|

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I would argue that memory safety is part of devex: it's just one less thing you have to be constantly vigilant about.

by araoz3 hours ago|

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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.

by NewsaHackO2 hours ago|

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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.

by jmull42 minutes ago|

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A large, complex, unasked for PR is pretty likely pointless to throw at any serious project. (Well, it's pointless if your goal is to merge something.)

Working together is a two-way process. To land a big change, the bun people probably needed to have been working/coordinating with the zig people throughout. E.g., zig outright cannot accept PRs that break the language in unplanned ways and any conflicts with the roadmap would need to be resolved.

I would assume the bun people know all this. That makes it more of a publicity stunt than a serious attempt to contribute to zig, and we should probably all treat it that way.

by NewsaHackO20 minutes ago|

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Of course, and it is expected that large pull requests/RFCs are iterated on. I will not believe Bun seriously asked for a pull request to be merged with absolutely no expectation of back and forth discussion. But this isn’t what happened. The whole reason everyone thought it was rejected by Zig because Bun used LLM to generate it was because they responded in a way that someone would if they didn’t want a certain pull request accepted under any circumstances. Which is my point; it I just insane that their largest project submitted a pull request, and they just rejected it with prejudice, gave some statement saying the real and potentially fixable reasons why, then turn around and say we don’t want your help, we are doing this in house.

by F3nd01 hours ago|

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Compromising on project goals just because someone with somewhat different goals made a pull request doesn’t exactly scream responsible and professional to me. The way I understand it, many people appreciate Zig because it’s very consistent and restrained about the kinds of problems it’s trying to solve and how, so being very careful with accepting complex, externally developed solutions seems perfectly in character for the language.

I’m not sure how well the Zig developers have handled their communication, so perhaps there really was room for improvement there.