Maybe you're being coy by asking a rhetorical question you already know the answer to but I'll answer as if you asked sincerely...
There are 2 different groups interacting with software products:
(1) end-users : this is where the "Who cares what language it's written in?!?" is usually applicable. E.g. The finance guys using MS Excel don't care whether it's written in assembly, BASIC, or C Language.
(2) code contributors and/or programming language enthusiasts who see other projects as "validation" of the whatever language they've invested in: these people definitely care.
For all the decades that computer languages have been debated, Group (2) will always discuss projects language choices. E.g. reddit.com switching from Lisp to Python, the Linux kernel fiercely debating future Rust contributions , the Typescript compiler switching from Javascript to Go, Bun switching from Zig to Rust, etc.
People try to lecture others in Group 2 about "don't make a programming language your identity" ... but people are human and they can't look at all the above language choices as totally detached observers. They like to talk about it!
If one is a Zig coder that contributed to the previous Bun Zig codebase, we can't expect them to be neutral observers.
There are not nearly enough disenfranchised Bun-on-Zig contributors to make a dent in this conversation. There are lots of Group 3s in every similar convo, for any combination of technology, project, and acquirer you can name.
Personally I chose not to disclose my findings in public to avoid this kind of outcome. Having a good laugh with others is not as important as keeping the result of this experiment undisturbed.
This also eliminates the chance of another round of marketing of LLM ability based on actual human contributions and I suggest everyone who is able to analyze the code to do the same - so that they cannot misattribute our ability to LLMs.
And for most part I don't think it was communicated well apart from the last blog post.
You just AI generated 1 millions lines of code claiming it's for safety. Who exactly is to make any kind of security guarantees about this?
With regards to AI-generated code, this means the copyrightability (at all, not with regard to who owns it) turns on whether or not a human was substantially involved in its creation.
Existing decisions require evidence of pretty heavy and continued human guidance to qualify.+
To wit, autonomous agent created code (prompt -> machine churns for hours -> output) is explicitly not eligible for copyright.
Functionally, this is a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, it means anything coded with autonomous agents by Meta, Google, et al. can be legally reused if it leaks (because no one could hold copyright on it).
On the other hand, it leaves copy-left open source licenses in a weird place. If you convert open source (even MIT/BSD-style) code into something else with an autonomous coding agent... the result has no copyright (nor can ever in the US).
In this instance, Bun was MIT-licensed, no? Then it was shoved mostly-autonomously through an LLM for the port.
Now Bun-Rust is technically still MIT licensed, but if push came to shove it seems like US law's current position is that Bun-Rust would now have no copyright license (because the manner in which it was developed renders it ineligible for copyright).
That's on the copyright side.
On the infringing usage side (i.e. whether you were entitled to shove a copyrighted work into a coding agent to produce something)... that's still TBD.
^ https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2025/03/23-523...
I think it's the "infringing usage" question that is more interesting. If the LLM trained on GPL-derived code, what does that mean for the end result?
Either it means nothing at all, or it means that a substantial portion of the code produced at some of the world's most valuable companies over the last two and a half years is GPL.
Anthropic, apparently, not the least because they blanket-closed all issues submitted before the rewrite. If the language were irrelevant, it shouldn’t matter for the existing unfixed issues.
You'll need a citation for that. While I'm still not sure whether Claude Code's issue tracker is worth much (Anthropic doesn't seem to engage with individual issues a while lot), it still has 5k+ open issues ranging back to March 2025. Bun also still has all of its Zig-timeline issues, all 5k+ of them. So what's this about?
the language is relevant for political not technical reasons. you could say, blanket closing the Issues, getting rid of this thing called Jarred from your stack, etc., is really an attack on the GitHub and the GitHub Agitator Lifestyles, which is why so many commenters on Hacker News actually care.
This is even more interesting given that prewar Bun was not a well respected code base. This matters if the code was bad, were the tests bad / not comprehensive as well? If so, the translation to rust whose sole / primary target was test-passing will have a fair amount of undocumented bugs in it.
> poster child for Zig programming language actually being the prime example of How Not To Write Zig Code
https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...
Issues on GitHub was mass closed claiming zig is no longer relevant without fixing the real issues.
In fact a lot of "feature requests" like npm compatibility related or missing specs etc ALL also got closed for being "zig" because reproduction and suggested solution were of course zig.
Again doesn't mean it got "auto fixed".
> What is the governance structure for Bun by the way? Couldn't find any documents/explanations about how it's supposed to work. I'm guessing it's essentially just "Anthropic decides what gets done and accepted" today?
And this is a valid question. You are not "defending reality" by refusing to listen to it.
In summary and based solely on my understanding:
- Jared misled people about the intentions of the migration. It's not the worst thing in the world, but it's certainly worthy of criticism.
- Jared has commented before about locking out human contributors from open source projects. Whether he was making a larger point is irrelevant as his comment stands on its own.
- Other Bun contributors, past and future, outside of those employed by Anthropic, did not and likely will not have equal access to the model Jared used for the rewrite.
Jared, working in the public Bun repository, used tooling not available to his community to experiment with a signficant migration. He dismissed all concerns and told people it's just a bit of fun, and that it shouldn't be taken seriously. Most of the controversy would have been avoided were the experiment done in private.
None of this is a big scandal but questions about the project are entirely justified.
Similar to the Claude Code 60s timeout incident [1] it could just be "Jarade decides what gets done and accepted"
It seems like when some folks see “open source” they think the project maintainers owe them something.
An open source MIT license of the source code is very different from being the original copyright holder.
The rust code is not yet in a stable release, and CC only switched to it in the latest version, so there's not been 60 days of widespread battle testing yet, so i don't see how we could possibly say it will have no negative difference. It hasn't, because nobody is using it yet. It still might.
>Literally who cares what language a JS toolset is written in?
I don't care what language it's in, but i do care how it is written and maintained. I'm not going to trust my projects to a runtime that was written by an LLM in two weeks with practically no human review
You don't create PRs like this when you're working "completely in the open"
test ci #30412
No description provided.
Rewrite Bun in Rust #30412DRAFT: DON'T MERGE CI TEST
and then they forget to close em when they go another route and they sit around for 2 months until they auto close or they fix it up into something reviewable. It's been a thing at literally every place I've worked are you really saying you don't see that?
I don't consider the following comment to be good, honest, and open communication:
> There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.
... and a few days later he decided that the code wouldn't get thrown out. That doesn't make the comment itself dishonest, he didn't have a crystal ball.
You can absolutely argue that the rewrite was not communicated clearly once they committed to it, but I don't think the comment you linked to there stands as evidence of poor communication at the time it was written.
> Inevitable collapse
According to who? You? The well ackshually guy?
> Low in trust before acquisition
Cite your sources.
> Unreleased version
v140 is the canary version which has been available for a long time.
https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/releases/tag/canary
> Not open source anymore
Who died and made you the dictator of open source?
Your post is just a bunch of opinions and lies and speculation wrapped as facts.
What is actually going on with that tag? It has files uploaded in Jul 29, 2024 and files uploaded "6 hours ago" (some hours after Simon first published his blog post). Do they not do proper releases with immutable tags and instead use one tag kind of like a git branch that mutates and changes over time?
I don't like that, personally. I think the project would be easier to reason about if they shipped alpha versions instead.