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Comment by Levitating | Hacker News Reader

I am still just shocked that Claude Code was written in Typescript, not C++, Rust or Python.

It also somehow messed up my alacritty config when I first used it. Who knows what other ~/.config files it modifies without warning.

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I'm surprised Python is on that list. TypeScript doesn't seem like a terrible choice, as it can leverage vast ecosystems of packages, has concurrency features, a solid type system, and decent performance. C++ lacks as robust of a package ecosystem, and Python doesn't have inbuilt types, which makes it a non-starter for larger projects for me. Rust would have been a great choice for sure.

Python and C++ have been used for countless large projects— each one for many more than typescript. It’s all about trade-offs that take into account your tasks, available coders at the project’s commencement, environment, etc.

People like to put companies that are household names on pedestals, but the choices they make are mostly guided by what their people can do and which choices give them the most value for free. They mostly operate how smaller companies do but they have a bigger R&D budget to address issues like scale that the larger market has little incentive to solve.

Also, this product is like a year old… it has barely hit its teething phase. I wouldn’t be surprised if the core is still the prototype someone whipped up as a proof of concept.

I reckon some believe these companies are basically magical, and are utterly astonished when they’re shown to be imperfect in relatively uninteresting ways. I’m a lot more concerned about the sanity of the AI ecosystem they operate in than the stability of some front-end Anthropic made.

> I'm surprised Python is on that list.

I mostly mentioned it because it is pre-installed on some (linux) systems. Though of course if you're trying to obfuscate the sourcecode you need to bundle an interpreter with the code anyway.

But it has historically been used for big programs, and there are well established methods for bundling python programs into executables.

"Python doesn't have inbuilt types"

False.

>Python doesn't have inbuilt types

Technically, neither does JavaScript.

Well, nobody mentioned it technically. Like nobody mentioned Assembly but it is under the hood.

False analogy.

Boris Cherney is author of a oreilly book about typescript

Yeah, this seems like a personal choice, which does work out given the current result.

They have an annoying sandbox issue which pollutes your repository root with a set of empty files. Not the cleanest tool, but the paradigm is a big upgrade to previous AI coding.

    .bash_profile .bashrc .claude .env .gitconfig .gitmodules .idea
    .mcp.json .profile .ripgreprc .vscode .zprofile .zshrc config

https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime/is...

Because Typescript is the best language for most things.

is it using oclif?

> Who knows what other ~/.config it modifies without warning

Me. My .config is git-versioned :)

Anthropic acquired Bun. Clearly, Bun is not a runtime for C++, Rust, or Python. For an engineering project, strongly typed TypeScript was basically the only possible choice for them.

Anthropic acquired Bun after making Claude Code.

I am not following your logic. Anthropic acquired Bun and so all of their end-user software should use it?

Or am I missing sarcasm?

Is Anthropic's acquisition of Bun alone still not enough to infer their tech stack? What more obvious signals would be needed?

Also, honestly, given the speed constraints of large models, it makes almost no difference what language an agent is written in. The small performance differences between programming languages do not even begin to matter compared with network latency, let alone the speed at which a large model streams tokens.

Why do you think they acquired Bun. To look at it?

Also you needed a leak to know that CC, that is out for 1 year, is in TS?

> Why do you think they acquired Bun

I don't know why they acquired Bun. Surely not because there's no other means to write command line programs.

> Also you needed a leak to know that CC, that is out for 1 year, is in TS?

What, are you shaming people for not being aware what (obfuscated) code some 1 year old software is written in?

So what do you think the obfuscated .js code in a 2026 engineering project was generated with? Nim?

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