Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

The Bun codebase had a similar number of lines of code before the rewrite.

There's nothing unusual about a rewrite coming in with a similar LOC number.

I think the unusual thing is that it was written in a week. I highly doubt that they read and understood all 1M lines. But if it works and people use it, what does that mean for software? Should we still care about the code that’s written? Should we even look? I’ve always thought so, but maybe I’m just biased.

I think we should care way more about what the validation story is of code. The obvious question does it all work? I'm happy to not look at any code if we have good ways to validate what is there. The other thing I care about is the architectural structure of the code. Given its a port I don't think that would have changed.

I was going to comment this same thing.

I don't know enough about what Bun does... But Rust is so insanely complicated, it's hard for me to wrap my head around how Bun is equally complictated.

Complicated things can often be expressed very succinctly - the hard part is in understanding why the short program does what it is supposed to.

Simple things often take a lot of space, simply because there's a lot of similar but different simple things that each need to be written down.

Lines of code just isn't a good measure of "complicated".

They are complicated in different ways. The rust compiler doesn’t include redis, Postgres, and S3 clients for instance.

If anything, it's a little surprising that the Rust code isn't significantly larger because I tend to think of Rust as requiring somewhat more boilerplate than JS.

The code was using Zig before, not JS.

Ah fair point. I don't have a sense of which of those are more verbose.

Zig is, typically. And yet here, the rust rewrite is around 60% more lines of code.

Not to mention how trigger happy LLMs can be when it comes to being overly verbose and adding unnecessary bits even with explicit direction not to do so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com