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Respectfully, as an OSS maintainer (not to the scale of nginx or valkey, of course)... if a third-party used an AI agent to rewrite my software in a different language, that gives me absolutely no reason to support that new project.

It is in all respects foreign code in a language I may or may not be familiar with, and worse yet, if I were to take over, I'd be responsible for maintaining the whole black box forever more?

Thank you but no thanks.

by baq1 hours ago|

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I don’t think anyone expects you to TBH. If you show interest, great. If not, the robot will translate your work into a different form of expression anyway. If you’re releasing open source software under BSD-like licenses, it’s still better than some company taking your work and selling it with zero value contributed back.

by rxhampton57 minutes ago|

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This kind of nihilistic argument worked in 2000 when open source software was a counter movement.

by patates53 minutes ago|

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I don't understand how it's nihilistic and how it doesn't work in 2026.

by ianm2181 hours ago|

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Yes I hope this can be separated from people who are inundating OSS maintainers with slop PRs - these are fully separate projects with zero expectation of involvement from maintainers. Valkey itself is forked off the original Redis.

There might be a world where people soon just find unsafe C code exposed to the web (i.e. nginx) an untenable situation and I hope it can be a helpful resource.

Anyway, I see open source code as positive sum. Maybe in the end only a small community who cares about cross compilation finds this helpful and thats a win!

by dyauspitr1 hours ago|

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Why would you have to take it over? Wouldn’t it just be a fork/different project entirely.

by jspdown4 minutes ago|

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I find this kind of rewrite both disrespectful and completely useless. Useless because the difficulty isn't getting to a working state but maintaining it. You now have to build a community around it to make any of this worthwhile. What would this software be worth if security issues weren't patched and bugs weren't fixed? You can't do this alone. And I find it disrespectful because people have spent decades building this, and you're taking all that collectively built knowledge to create something that will compete with the project itself.

I hope people will restrain themself from doing this at least in the name of good ethic. I fear this is going to hurt OSS a lot.

I hope people will hold back from this, if only out of respect for the work that came before. I fear it could do real damage to OSS. It would discourage the maintainers whose effort makes any of it possible.

by notnullorvoid1 hours ago|

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I love Rust, but porting others software to Rust (or any language) is a mixed bag. I'm a strong believer that good software requires deep domain knowledge to build and maintain. Porting code you don't understand by hand already risks still not understanding it afterwards, doing it in an automated fashion all but guarantees it.

All that to say I think these automated ports are interesting experiments. However if you want to build something people can trust, the people need to be able to trust that you fully understand what is built, and why it's built the way it is.

by dingnuts1 hours ago|

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[dead]

by rxhampton1 hours ago|

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If someone is porting such disparate projects as Valkey and Lua it is just for show and will be pre-alpha forever.

No one wants Bun in Rust, no one wants the rsync vibe code additions. This is just the only pro-AI comment, so the AI people voted it to the top.

by ianm2181 hours ago|

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Hmm my reasoning was that in order to have Nginx work in Rust you want to expose scripting so having a decent Lua in Rust is key to not call out to C for that. And then Valkey/ Redis is a lot simpler than nginx so it was a good way to learn how some of this works.

And I'd disagree on no one wants - Lua is quite helpful since it is easily used in WASM. There has been some interest from people in the Bevy community - a game engine in Rust - since you can't have Lua scripting in browser games easily with the C version.

But anyway if people want it or not memory safety might become much more important so I think it is a good area to explore. Some people think large C codebases are inherently unsecurable https://alexgaynor.net/2020/may/27/science-on-memory-unsafet...

by baq1 hours ago|

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I don’t care if bun is written in zig, rust, go, f# or sql. If it works, it works.

I also don’t care if it’s written by humans or LLMs or robot overlords from Alpha Centauri. Again, if it works, it works.

The operative word here is ‘works’. Code is now cheap, QA still isn’t. Since people don’t really like doing the same thing twice, specs for working code have never been written. Nowadays there is no reason to not create a spec detailed enough for robots to make no mistakes (pun intended) when filling in the gaps when converting from spec space to code space. As long as this remains true, I don’t care who or what does the boring parts.