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Comment by docmars | Hacker News Reader

Bun's migration to Rust was nothing more than a marketing stunt to sell more Claude subs under the impression it can perform this kind of work at scale, assuming that most who were convinced by it wouldn't look under the hood at what really took place.

It has its merits as a proof of concept that could eventually be cleaned up and released properly later, but I can't see it any other way.

Too many see it as this miraculous one-shot and are using it as a blueprint to justify more layoffs and buzzword salad in their boisterous LinkedIn announcements about how they're "completely overhauling their strategy" in engineering. Hogwash.

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Not sure I understand. Bun's changes are merged on the dev branch and available for use, no?

EDIT: Oh, look, blog post on the front page now.

https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust

> Bun v1.3.14 was the last version of Bun written in Zig. Bun v1.4.0 will be the first version of Bun written in Rust. It's available in canary now.

So, yes, it seems it was definitely more than a "marketing stunt" and it's broadly available and slated to be the production release soon.

The irony is that the blog post actually points out as pain points the reasons many of us assert languages like Zig are out of place in the 21st century.

A nice collection of heap-use-after-free crash, use-after-free crash, crash and out-of-bounds read, memory leak, double-free crash, race condition crash.

A minor version bump? Exciting times we live in.

What exactly is your complaint? It doesn't make any breaking changes. That's how semantic versioning works.

Bun is infrastructure. Why would I want my infrastructure to be unstable? (By the way, 10,000 unsafe blocks last I checked, though the number is going down somewhat.)

I've never used bun on production for this very reason. But nevertheless, tens of thousands of people and businesses do.

And I'm not sure how you're responding to my comment. The parent said "this is a marketing stunt" derogatorily, as if it's slop that doesn't work. This is already the canary build, it's more stable than the current stable, and is actively in production products in wide use.

The parent is objectively wrong, whether or not I personally use Bun.

Marketing could of course be one of the main motivations, but it's not a "stunt". More like a marketing achievement, I guess? Stunt implies smoke and mirrors, and bun rewrite is quite real.

Also it cost $165K in tokens

Probably cheaper than doing it by hand, however, that's the short term "port x to y" cost, the longer term cost (or benefit) is a lot harder to calculate.

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