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Comment by fwlr | Hacker News Reader

Had to check the calendar to be sure it wasn’t somehow April 1st. No, it’s August. Huh.

I don’t see how it’s possible that the pnpm maintainers are unaware of the bun AI-rewrite-to-rust saga… so I’m baffled, befuddled, and overall at a loss to make sense of this decision.

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To be fair to the pnpm maintainers, they have been working on this well before the bun AI rewrite. The first commit in their rust experiment is in 2021.

https://github.com/pnpm/pn/commits/main/?after=e24c0b293f1f4...

https://bun.com/blog/bun-v1.4 has some pretty nice numbers indeed.

> unaware of the bun AI-rewrite-to-rust saga

I seem to be mostly unaware, at least, it's not self-explanatory to me why a Rust rewrite would be that baffling. What's the verdict on the Bun rewrite, and how does that relate to pnpm's decision? Also, wasn't Bun switching from Zig to Rust instead of from TypeScript to Rust like pnpm? I get the impression that many web infrastructure projects have been switching to more native languages.

I expect the pnpm maintainers to be familiar with it because bun is one of the other three or four major JavaScript package managers. To put it another way, if you gathered up the 100 people in the world working on the most similar problems to pnpm’s own work, like 15 or 20 of them would be working on bun.

I believe the objective verdict on the rewrite is “actually, everything went better than expected”, but it was and seemingly still is quite controversial and engendered a fair bit of bad blood, which I would have thought would be undesirable or demotivating to maintainers.

Bun rewrite seems like a big success story.

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