I think they're taking things "gradually" as they are under a lot of scrutiny and no rush for full release.
This is an impressive milestone for their rewrite. There are a lot of comments trying to downplay this as being unimpressive for some reason, but I can’t see them as anything other than sour grapes because the rewrite hasn’t crashed and burned like they were hoping.
But at some point if “moving one of the biggest actively maintained and used codebases to it without anyone noticing” is dismissed as “it doesn’t mean all that much”, then we’ve lost the plot a little bit somewhere.
(also, fwiw, a manual rewrite would be under the same scrunity and suffer from the same skepticism, at least when obviously rushed).
After spending a lot of time thinking about the language, I came up with a relatively simple algorithm based on the language design - there are a few operators that mutate state, so basically just try combinations of those until your next memory cell contains the thing that you want, then lock those instructions in and advance.
Basically RNG yourself to victory.
The original code for that algorithm is here (python, + my own interpreter): https://github.com/wallstop/malbolge-toolkit/tree/dd942fb981...
I've since llmified it as an exercise.
BUT! The whole reason for this comment is to nerd say that printing stuff is relatively easy if you invest the time in learning the language's primitives and think of programming in it more as algorithms to operate on the op codes instead of literally writing code.
Now, to do more interesting things other than printing - I'd have to spend even more time thinking about the language, which I don't want to
Thanks for sharing!
Really? We had language machines for decades that couldn't do it. One that could was only built in the last 2 years max but that's something you expect from language machines? Lol Okay
A calculator that can find all primes will be cool. A language machine that translates english into JavaScript is cool. A language machine that translates Zig into Rust is cool. Language machines are cool, not awe-inspiring or surprising to me.
Like, come on already.
However if "replacing small sections of code" is heralded as "the most amazing achievement in software development" then we've all lost the plot a little bit somewhere.
It makes sense both ways, no?
The reality is, of course, most people aren't going to notice. If the functionality and performance is 1:1 why would they? Is it impressive? A bit, but not how you're positioning it. People seem to forget LLMs are good at what they've learned from training data. And the LLM is good at compressing time. The only notable thing about these types of marketing spins is that a rewrite was accomplished in a small time frame that was hard to pull off before LLMs. The actual act of the move is less so.
Did the codebase improve? Is it more performant? I've seen nothing to really stake those claims with any objectiveness. Lastly: what was gained?
Claude code interacts with many system processes, files, etc, as well as external APIs. Processes audio via built in dictation. Manages a bunch of nasty auth. Etc etc.
What are the categories of features that wouldn't be exercised by this class of software?
To release this to the world and not have it be a catastrophe, they need to have confidence that Bun itself satisfies the promises that it has made, both explicitly and implicitly (bearing in mind Hyrum's law!) to all those projects out there using it, none of which are owned by Anthropic and many of which are not source visible to them. It's a much, much higher bar.