Christoffer Lernö
4K posts
@nuoji
Game developer @ AEGIK, working on @wararcana. Also tinkers with C3 (https://t.co/p7POZqx4IT)
It isn't unexpected that the focus of the Bun Rust rewrite is on the anti-Zig side more than anything, since the internet loves to hate. What is unexpected and unfortunate is that leadership within Bun hasn't tried to steer the conversation away from that at all. There are so many positive and interesting takeaways from this and I'm not really seeing any of them pushed as the primary message. A positive thing that hasn't been talked about at all is how far Bun came thanks to Zig. And even if you dump it now, its meaningful for how good Zig was to even build a product to this point and impact by any metric. I would've loved to see anyone in leadership say this. On the interesting side is how fungible programming languages are nowadays. Programming languages used to be LOCK IN, and they're increasingly not so. You think the Bun rewrite in Rust is good for Rust? Bun has shown they can be in probably any language they want in roughly a week or two. Rust is expendable. Its useful until its not then it can be thrown out. That's interesting! There's been a lot of talk about memory safety and no doubt Rust provides more guarantees than Zig. But I'd love to see a better analysis of why Bun in particular suffered so much rather than take the language-blame path. How could engineering as a practice been more rigorous to prevent this? What were the largest sources of crashes other programs should watch out for? How does Rust prevent them? How could Zig theoretically prevent them? That's interesting. I know the official blog post hasn't come out yet from Bun. But they're smart enough to know that that PR would stir up controversy the moment it opened, or they should've been. And plenty in the company have been tweeting and writing about it. Its somewhat telling to me in various dimensions what they chose to talk about first. I tend to think I'm pretty good at corporate PR/comms (especially when it comes to developer audiences) and I think appealing to the negative is never the right long term strategy; it does work to get short term eyes though.
Programming languages are awesome. They're one of the things that keeps me excited about the craft. I love learning about their capabilities, trade-offs, and how they really function under-the-hood. However, with the pacing of AI-assisted development, the language landscape begins to change. Rust isn't as difficult to read and review as it is to write, and if the agent handles the writing, then Rust becomes more accessible. Accessible languages in software development is a good thing. And if you don't care to read the code at all (maybe some very aggressive vibe coding, perhaps?), then who cares what the software is written in? Well, you probably want it to be fast so Rust is another good option here. And that agent that's writing this code needs feedback, but wouldn't it be easier if the toolchain could automatically surface feedback for the agent? Static types and a strong compiler can help with that! And guess who's got both of those things -- Rust. So what happens to all the other languages? I see a future where there are far fewer programming languages in mainstream circulation than there are today but I'd love to learn your thoughts on this. youtube.com/watch?v=_p23HH…
In Bun’s zig fork, we added parallel semantic analysis and multiple codegen units to the llvm backend on macOS & Linux This makes debug builds of Bun compile > 4x faster, improving internal development velocity
