cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/34303745
The last three months have not looked good for Bun. It started as one of the most impressive individual engineering projects I have seen, but has now turned into this weird AI-powered creature with continuous false promises and an increasingly frustrated community.
Oh but it was gonna be done with AI right? How’s that going? I see…
Looks like Bun 1.4 is out now: https://bun.com/blog/bun-v1.4
Good news: Looks like Bun’s competitive with Deno again on node support.
Bad news: Bun still has poor security compared to Deno.
Wait and see news: Is bun’s switch to rust going to be worth it over the long haul, or should they have worked on making their code better, or used a mix of languages where it’d make best sense to do so?
Looking forward to the blog posts that test it
Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.
Oof, that explains everything
Meanwhile, we have an entire ecosystem of JS tools being written in Rust that are absolutely amazing, including oxc, rolldown, biome, and so on. They’re not awesome because they’re written in Rust though, but because actual thought and effort was put into making them great. They could have been written in any language (see: eslint, prettier, vite, tsgo, and so on).
Bun was never behind for being written in Zig, but was actually pushed forward by the language to accomplish what would have been far more difficult to do in C.
What killed it was when Bun stopped committing human effort in favor of mass-produced slop. Where I used to recommend Bun, I now just recommend pnpm/Node.js.
As an aside, I’ve been using Boa as an embedded runtime recently, and I’ve been loving it. It doesn’t have the performance of other options, but it’s good enough™ and still has room to improve.
Homie probably went “Claude, rewrite this in rust” and left. Bit off too much. Dont listen to the AI companies, these things cannot be on their own.
Make no mistakes
From what I’ve seen from people that use AI, that would’ve been
Meak no mis teak!
Or similar. I swear, they can’t spell for shit.
The author described the process in Rewriting Bun in Rust. The tl;dr is it wasn’t as simple as prompting “rewrite this in Rust”, but the process was done entirely by a series of AI agents.
Absolute insanity. I wouldnt even do that with a project only intended for me to use.
I couldn’t afford to do it on a project only intended for me to use. It takes “throw money at the problem” to a different level. For the same cost, he could have put up bounties and gotten open source devs excited about the port.
Edit: meant to respond to a different comment. Whatever lol.
I am sure the project will be dead in a year
Not in a year, this project became a “use case” for ai. So won’t die soon.
