Hacker News Reader

Comment by reducesuffering | Hacker News Reader

Absolute crickets from the "there's no way LLM's can rewrite Bun to Rust this quickly, it's going to be buggy, it's marketing" crowd

Comments here 3 months ago are quite something: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48132488

View on HN

Sure I’ll bite the obvious bait, why not.

> Absolute crickets from the "there's no way LLM's can rewrite Bun to Rust this quickly, it's going to be buggy, it's marketing" crowd

> Comments here 3 months ago are quite something: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48132488

Did you… perhaps read the entire comment you just posted? The crowd that was saying “no way they did that in 11 days” sure seems correct given that the release today is 3 months later. 3 months is longer than 11 days. Significantly so, in fact.

1.4 also adds a lot of features so its more than a port. Plus Claude Code has been using the rust port since atleast July 19. So its definitely less than 3 months.

Or, more likely, the amount of crappy auto generated code and “features” they crammed into this release resulted in so many bugs that a “simple rewrite” would up being 3 months of whack-a-mole with the issues they created. That’s the predictable result from the lack of engineering discipline involved here.

Claude Code has millions of users and like I said had been using the 1.4 canary a lot earlier than 3 months. But even 3 months is an absurdly impressive timeline for this. And its even more insane to think LLMs are only going to get better. Jeez.

Not sure why people try so hard to interpret this in such a hostile way. It's very obvious that the 11 days were for the faithful, mechanical, agentic port, and then they followed up by commanding refactoring. The comments about the faithful port not being idiomatic rust are annoying

Be honest, though: had they shipped earlier—which they probably could have safely done—they would have been called “reckless” by the detractors. There was no way to make them happy here.

Perhaps. But they didn’t, instead they spent months claiming it was done, while maybe adding a bunch of new features (why? Get the base rewrite out first) which only made them look worse.

Everyone was saying they shouldn’t just accept the LLM’s output without cautious review. Seems they took the time to make sure it was a good release. Not sure why that doesn’t sound like a valid reason not to rush to you.

If they had used the time to actually review the code I would agree! But it sure seems like they used the time instead to play whack-a-mole on bugs and cram in about 50 new, completely unrelated features. That implies they still have not actually reviewed the code they are shipping.

You don’t know that. Also, fixing bugs is good.

> You don’t know that.

We’re literally on a thread discussing the release notes, which are filled with new features.

> Also, fixing bugs is good.

Yes, fixing bugs is good. The Bun team should have spent time on that in the first place, instead of creating a bunch more with this marketing fueled rewrite.

this is currently on the front page of lobsters, I saw it even before I saw the bun 1.4 release announcement https://tipiirai.com/writing/bun-rust-rewrite-worries

Lobste.rs is now flagging Bun 1.4 post as spam and comments are dismissing it as nothing, even as that blog post got much more discussion and piling on about the rewrite.

Internet echo chambers are quite a problem. AI success and its immense implications are wreaking havoc on the ability of even intellectuals in HN and lobsters to face reality in front of them, even as their predictions become falsified again and again.

> Internet echo chambers are quite a problem. AI success and its immense implications are wreaking havoc on the ability of even intellectuals in HN and lobsters to face reality in front of them, even as their predictions become falsified again and again.

In this scenario, do you see yourself as an intellectual? In this case, one that is illuminated by the glory of AI. Or just looking for validation and not finding?

honestly, no opinions on bun either way, I was just pointing out that the pushback against the big bang AI rewrite is far from quieted down.

The copium has run out it seems

Reply on news.ycombinator.com