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Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

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Article URL: https://raymyers.org/post/zed-creator-calls-spade-a-spade/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48889637

Points: 708

# Comments: 344

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720 points · 355 comments · 查看原帖

  1. RetroTechie

    There's so much good stuff in this post. Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why? Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen. Battle-tested, mature code > fresh rewrite. Existing Zig codebase has seen X amount of battle-testing. Rust rewrite: 0 (except -I'm assuming- passing test suites). Also: "this was a port to unsafe Rust, allowing a literal file-by-file migration to minimize risk" How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with? Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something. As it is, the impressive bit is do such a big rewrite & result seems to work ok. Are Bun users happy with this? To me it reads like Bun was forked. Will the Zig version survive? Wil

  2. CamouflagedKiwi

    Interesting article, seems more balanced than Andrew Kelley's one that it links to. The thing I still think is wrong: why are Anthropic rewriting a Javascript runtime from Zig to Rust? Why not rewrite Claude Code itself in Rust (or Go or whatever, lots of options there) and drop Bun completely. That actually seems like an easier solution (rather than having to create a performant, correct Javascript runtime, just rewrite your CLI console app in something else) and the final result is better (smaller and faster) although likely not on the most critical axes for them.

  3. vlaaad

    Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.

  4. woodruffw

    I think like most people, I don’t have a problem with Andrew “calling a spade a spade,” even if I find his reasoning motivated. The bigger problem with the post is that it talks out of both ends of the mouth: it’s clearly meant as a personal attack, but also insists that it isn’t. When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad, might subject me to this kind of article from their BDFL. I can’t conceive of the leadership of the Python or Rust or any other community I’ve ever worked with doing something like that.

  5. cropcirclbureau

    I stand with Andrew. As someone who's been following Sumner's work closely for years, Kelley's accusations are very much true even if unkind. While the results are useful and cool, it a wankfluencer op from start to finish. I dare you to refute thus. And I say all this as someone who does agentic development 8hrs a day and someone who always pestered my team to opt for Rust and Deno instead of Node. Call a spade a spade, the rewrite was poorly justified and one in a long lines of successful psyops Dario and co. cooked and delivered. Now, would Andrew's message have been better received if it had better "decorum"? Maybe. But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts. You have to appreciate that.

  6. jonkoops

    What I have been missing in all this debate is substance. I don't care that Bun was ported to Rust; I don't care that Andrew wrote a hit piece about it; I don't care that Anthropic sells shovels in the gold rush. What I do care about is technical details. Jared shared some motivation as to why they ported to Rust, and I think they look valid (even if provided with sparse evidence). But I have not seen any sort of refutation from Andrew that these are not actually issues or how they should be solved in Zig canonically. I'd really like to see an exploration of these arguments, specifically pertaining to the Zig code as it was written for Bun.

  7. jswny

    I agree with some of Kelley’s takes, but the issue is the tone. Does anyone think that if Bun had been rewritten from Rust to Zig that a member of the Rust core team would have written a personal hit piece against Sumner (while pretending it isn’t a hit piece)? Probably not. Kelley can write what he wants, but as the BDFL of a rising programming language, people are allowed to react if they don’t agree with the public image being portrayed by Zig.

  8. simjnd

    Thank you. I was left confused after people praised the Bun to Rust blog post eventhough it contained very actual technical substance. No clear evaluation of options, very biased report on impact, missing figures. It absolutely didn't feel like an engineering blog post. Maybe people were more interested in the agentic part more than the actual rationale for the port in the first place, because it was very disappointing from a technical standpoint.