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  • I want zig to succeed but given that zig is not yet 1.x I'd imagine a large code base like bun would have difficulties addressing major breaking changes. Also given the fact that bun is using a fork of zig https://x.com/bunjavascript/status/2048427636414923250?s=20
    by jr-14
  • Given the recent gripe that Bun/Anthropic indicated regarding compile times with Zig (i.e. that their vibe-coded 4x compilation speedup PR wasn't accepted), it appears to me as an "interesting" move to switch to a language that probably delivers 4x longer compilations than even vanilla Zig.
    by carpenecopinum
  • I'll be very interested in how this AI port turns out. I am involved in a number of active projects that are being held back by the language / framework is holding back the project, but where a rewrite would be too big of a project to undertake by using only human power.

    I've had more success vibe coding Rust than I have in more dynamic languages. I suspect the strictness of the Rust compiler forces the AI agent to produce better code. Not sure. It could be just that I am less familiar with Rust so it feels like it's doing a better job.

    by Humphrey
  • I wonder if a successful, albeit slower, approach would be to walk the git commit history in lockstep, applying the behavioral intent behind each commit. If they did this, I would be interested in knowing if they were able to skip certain bug fix commits because the Rust implementation sidestepped the problem.
    by tacitusarc
  • Linked commit is probably not the most convincing for this tagline. Here's a branch[0] of Claude mass rewriting Zig code into Rust which is currently at 773,950 additions and 151 deletions:

    [0]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/compare/claude/phase-a-port

    by archargelod
  • Interesting how times have changed. Back in 2015, the entire Go runtime (already a mature codebase) was rewritten from C to Go semi-automatically: one of the maintainers wrote a C-to-Go conversion tool (for a subset of C they used) so that it compiled and produced identical output, and then the resulting code was manually refactored to make the Go code more idiomatic and optimized. And now you can just ask a language model.

    The slides: https://go.dev/talks/2015/gogo.slide#3

    An interesting similarity:

    >We had our own C compiler just to compile the runtime.

    The Bun team maintain their own fork of Zig too

    by kgeist
  • Interesting to see this when the current top post on HN is someone worrying about Bun as it was acquired by Anthropic. The top comment there describes “Anthropic does experiments on their own codebase, the Bun team is not gonna do the same vibe coding experiments”.

    Yet here we are, what looks like a massive undertaking for vibe coding.

    Time will tell how this will turn out. Would be nice if the Bun maintainers could give some clarification about what they’re doing here, and why they’re doing this.

    by stingraycharles
  • I work on Bun and this is my branch

    This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.

    I’m curious to see what a working version of this looks, what it feels like, how it performs and if/how hard it’d be to get it to pass Bun’s test suite and be maintainable. I’d like to be able to compare a viable Rust version and a Zig version side by side.

    by Jarred

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