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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

I think we can quibble about the Bun post’s factual claims. But I don’t think the post was deceptive or dishonest in its claims. Like most technical writing, it represents a vantage point.

As for ghosting in meetings: sure, that seems bad. I would also be upset if someone did that to me. But you can state that factually without making it into a personal attack. It would even be more convincing.

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> Like most technical writing,

I think you've missed the core thesis of the article. That post _wasn't_ technical writing. It was marketing disguised as technical writing.

It’s marketing that is also technical writing. Most companies do this, and IMO we should prefer this over the alternative (which is corporate blogspam).

Compare Cloudflare, the Google Chrome Security blog, etc.

It was way too technical to disqualify it as not being technical writing. Writing can serve multiple purposes.

> I don’t think the post was deceptive or dishonest in its claims

Presenting only one side of argument (only pros, no cons, etc.) is deceptive and dishonest. The fact that they were incredibly focused on build time in Zig and didn't even talk about it as a tradeoff going to Rust is very telling.

Are we talking about the same post? This is the one I’m talking about[1], and I can’t see where it’s claimed that Rust’s build times are better. Apologies if I’m missing it.

(The one reference I found to Rust’s compile times is them talking about how they had to split their Rust rewrite into 100 crates. A plain reading of this is the opposite of what you’re saying: they’re pointing out that Rust’s compile times are slower, but that this wasn’t an overriding negative.)

You don't have to claim that they're better, but making a big fuss about them in Zig - to the point of maintaining a compiler fork - and then not talking about it at all in the Rust doc (where it's apparent to anyone who's used Rust that compilation there is guaranteed to be slower) is dishonest or at least massively hypocritical.

Where are they making a big fuss?

I knew that LLMs had caused reading comprehension to tank, but I quite literally already directly answered that question - as did the original article under discussion here.

You haven’t answered it, and I can’t find a fair reading that would lend itself to that interpretation either. You can easily correct me by quoting the part of the Bun post that you find to be “making a big fuss.”

(Surely a relatively bland technical criticism of Zig - one that gets couched with praise - does not count as “a big fuss.”)

> making a big fuss about them in Zig - to the point of maintaining a compiler fork

Literal quote (and again, appeared in the original article as well). Forking the compiler to try to get faster compile times is a significant effort that absolutely counts as raising a fuss.

The word “fuss” doesn’t occur in the original Bun article.

I also don’t think that forking the compiler is a big fuss. Large companies do that all the time, to carry whatever patches they haven’t upstreamed yet (or can’t). It’s really not that big of a deal.

The bun team made no mention of compile times in their post. The author of this post points to other work by bun that was hardly making a big fuss. It was just a Twitter post about parallelizing some things to make builds faster.

> But you can state that factually without making it into a personal attack. It would even be more convincing.

I 100% agree with this.

I was just saying that you are probably less at risk of triggering people if you don't politely lie about stuff they make. I don't 100% agree with Andrew's response and I think he should apologize or explain more.

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