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Comment by qwery | Hacker News Reader

The facts as presented from the Bun side show a lack of technical merit for the rewrite. This shouldn't be surprising, because rewrites are bad engineering, in most cases.

The Bun project was started in Zig by someone with a lack of experience using the language, despite the massive scope and complexity, and was effectively a rewrite from another language in the first place.

From the Bun post:

> Bun started as a line-for-line port of esbuild's JavaScript & TypeScript transpiler from Go to Zig.

Then, a few years later, the entire codebase was thrown out to do another rewrite in another language.

What is there to address?

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Porting TypeScript to Go in 7.0 doesn’t seem like bad engineering. Neither does this port, given that that Bun started out in a somewhat buggy state.

> Porting TypeScript to Go in 7.0 doesn’t seem like bad engineering.

They needed 10x speedup and it was not possible with the current language. And they chose Go, because they could retain 1:1 architecture in most cases. So whether or not it was well engineered, is not so clear. They did not choose Rust because they would have needed to redesign the whole architecture.

In the case of Bun, it smells more like bad engineering, so I am not sure if these are comparable.

Completely different approaches. The TypeScript Go port was done responsibly, reviewing every line ported, publishing both runtimes in parallel to give it time for real-life battle testing, with plenty of communication to the community about what was happening.

The Bun Rust port was irresponsible and unprofessional, merging a million lines of unreviewed code while gaslighting the community, relentlessly casting shade on Zig while pretending to be neutral and objective. The Bun rewrite was not just bad engineering, but also (one might say "stinky") management and community relations.

It's no wonder the author of Zig blew up emotionally - which was also unprofessional but at least it was honest and human, unlike Bun's author.

Relentlessly? Where did he post about this and how often?

> rewrites are bad engineering, in most cases.

I think this situation is a referendum on whether that is still true—or, if it is true, whether the proportions on “most” have changed significantly due to AI.

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