Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
It's even more funny if you know the backstory of bun. It was basically the perfect example of how to not to do things before they burned a whole forrest to have Claude slop it into another language, based on a codebase that was measurably bad. Now nobody actually knows the whole codebase anymore.
Given the phenomenal garbage that are the other big vibecoded projects (like the "compiler that can compile Linux" - it can't) using bun now is just like lottery.
What was wrong with bun before? I never used it just heard it had some great performance
The code quality apparently was abysmal and full of dirty hacks due to a mix of "beginner energy" and "go fast & break things" Silicom Valley mindset. The issues with bun (leading to the big Anthropic hack) were subtly blamed on the Zig language, even though Zig is completely fine; Bun's code (which already was full of bad generated slop at that point, as well as code by programmers who were treated badly -> more bad code) was just crap.
After Zig was blamed the Zig creator wrote a blogpost detailing all of it. Worth a read, certainly more human than the corposlop Anthropic announces.
andrew kelley is such a cool guy his attitude alone made me want to learn zig
zig is cool
I heard it had a lot of "just works" magic (and I've been burned many times on the cjs/mjs thing plus whatever the fuck deno is doing) so I get the appeal but also never used it.
I think the unfortunate takeaway from this story is that rewriting a codebase of that size for under $200k using AI makes this endeavor suddenly feasible in a way that it previously wouldn’t have been. Some organizations have reason enough to spend a year rewriting with multiple engineers, but have no interest in a year-long feature freeze. But a 2-week feature freeze? The current money is starting to make sense and more orgs are going to start biting.
But also, that number is a lie. They haven't published any releases from that rewrite, it's still considered experimental, and they've spent weeks continuing to iterate upon it and certainly driving that number way higher. But they declared it done via blogpost to get that price-point and timeline in the headlines. Yet it still isn't shippable, and they're still burning cash and time on it
That’s good to know. I wasn’t aware of that