I have learned so much reading Andrew’s code and as I said in the original post: Bun would never have happened without Zig.
> The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.
I know very little about Jared but his article yesterday, which I read, seemed appreciative of Zig. I now learn he's donated significant chunks of money to them.
This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product.
It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig when it really just makes them look childish. Or maybe he doesn't care, and just wants to attack Jarred?
It's kind of strange to not engage with any of the points made in the article. Unlike you, I don't think the post makes them look childish at all. I think it raises a lot of valid points and makes me want to use Zig more.
I'm rather critical of spamming humans with low effort LLM writing as well, but getting a neutral opinion about a text seems like a decent use tbh - for lack of alternatives because you'd hardly ask a human to do it.
Conventions are still being made, and I think this use might end up being acceptable.
How is pasting an article into an LLM going to get you a neutral opinion? It'll be at best an 'opinion' that aligns towards the fine tune dataset used by the org that made the LLM. I'd rather people own their own bias and bring something into the conversation rather than act as a mouthpiece for a statistical median.
I'm glad that you asserted that you do have potential hidden bias and say that you used an LLM to judge the tone of an article partly pertaining to AI usage in coding right after.
Edit: Ah, my brain's been fried by comments that say this unironically and I read this as sincere, thanks commenter below, and apologies commenter above.
I think I have some bias. I like rust. I like using opus, I don't want to use zig, don't see the point for it, but I find it aesthetically pleasing. I don't use JavaScript I wish it would disappear. If I did ise JavaScript I wouldn't run it on bun. Some of those tilt me either way. I agree with the LLMs take on the tone. The result of the two posts is that I think Jarred is a poopyhead, andrew is a bit childish but genuine and I'd probably like him, and I still won't use zig or bun or JavaScript. I plan to keep using rust and opus.
Please, I'm begging you, and the people that scan across this comment:
Finishing mastering reading comprehension; It will help you for the rest of your life.
I'm not snarking, this is a problem affecting 30% or more of the population here in the states, and it's getting worse because of tools like AI. I'm not judging you, I don't think you are bad or deficient people, but this externalsing of comprehension and trust is self-harm.
Worse, it will lead you astray in ways that you won't tie back to this core problem.
To use an LLM safely you must have the discernment to understand when it has fallen into sycophancy, folly, or madness.
Uhm, I'm very confused by the last part of your comment. You put it into an LLM to...understand the tone? Is that supposed to convince me of something?
They phrased it poorly, but from context it seems clear they intend the LLM as a less biased third-party measure of the tone which agrees with their own assessment.
Very weird indeed. People must not realize that you can completely change the response you get back from an LLM by how you ask questions. Any bias can implicitly be implanted in the question you ask and drastically modify the response. This is what I got Gemini to say about the article:
The author’s tone in this piece can be described as brutally candid, deeply relieved, and unapologetically sarcastic.
very different from "The overall tone is deeply personal, cathartic, biting, and polemical, with flashes of humor and a deliberate attempt to soften the ending."
Personally I don't think that matters, because the article is problematic enough when it can be read like ad hominem. Assuming that the question was phrased reasonably neutrally (but not necessarily free of hidden biases), the fact that LLM concluded so is an enough evidence here. Also as a non-LLM data point, I felt roughly same (especially the "softening" bit).
this is what worries me. I have friends that love what AI tells them about their personal pet 'thing' and how awesome it is. Yet not one of them has even tried once to get the AI to criticise it's own answers, and hence learn that you can trivially get an AI to make a convincing-_sounding case for any point of view.
I tell them to try, and they laugh at me as they roll their eyes and waffle on about 'tricking' the AI like its some kind of hacking.
FWIW I was really interested in Zig and now I see that its lead developer is thin-skinned and bitter and has confused minimal criticism of his project with an attack on his person.
This is such a bad look and it's also flatly self-contradictory. He spends time in his conclusion asserting he doesn't have any personal criticisms of Jarred but he's fully happy to claim, reframe and repeat everyone else's, even criticisms he evidently heard in private.
You can also see that it was incompletely rewritten from a pure, personalised and personally-directed rant: "I noticed that you…" does not belong with the rest of the text.
Whatever the merits of Claude-driven rewrites (I suspect few, long-term), the article he is responding to has little to none of the vituperative quality of his own.
I think if it needed a response, and I was this angry, I would have written this whole post as a draft, filed it away in Apple Notes, and then posted "I have, yes, seen the article on the Bun blog; you don't need to send me it anymore! I will respond to parts of it in the future as and when they are particularly relevant."
Writing the response post can be valuable as emotional release or exploration. Posting it in this sprawling, mean form was dumb.
This entire thread puts me out on devs. I stuns me that there are this many people who either excuse or cheer on being hateful. Wanting to use a project becaues the author was this rude....what?
Just a complete lack of emotional intelligence. You do not treat people like this.
> It's kind of strange to not engage with any of the points made in the article. Unlike you, I don't think the post makes them look childish at all. I think it raises a lot of valid points and makes me want to use Zig more.
I know nothing about the drama here other than what's in the blog post, but these feel more like unnecessarily public personal attacks which don't really reflect well:
- a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective
- already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
- their vague "sell some cloud something" business plan was a farce
Those are not personal criticisms, those are all professional criticisms. There are many people who don't seem to know the different between work and life and so they may conflate the two, but to me it's pretty obvious.
How is it unprofessional when it is simply someone giving their honest personal opinion on an issue that involves something that is valuable to them, on their personal blog nonetheless.
Is everyone a walking and talking brand now so that they have to always filter their words, walk on eggshells, hide behind corpo-speak so as to seem 'professional'?
More honest discourse is required in today's world, not less. It seems interactions online are becoming less and less authentic.
> Those people talked to each other. Everybody talked to everybody. The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.
There’s a big gap between corpo speak and “stinky manager”. That’s nowhere close to professional writing. And he’s not giving us his personal opinion, Kelley is telling us the conclusion of the “grape vine” - he’s reporting on rumors and gossip, and agreeing with it.
> He's not operating personally as the leader of a major project.
What? So let me get this straight--if my open source project which I have given away for free becomes "major" (for some definition) then all of a sudden I have to filter my writing through some kind of average acceptableness test? Come on. [edit] It would be one thing if this was published on Zig letterhead, but it was the guy's personal blog...
You have to if you give a shit about the community you are leading, yes. You're not operating as a private figure in that role, everything you do affects the community and it is blind or selfish to act otherwise.
This is so deeply wrong. This person owes you nothing. You're accusing them of "selfishness" after they've given away thousands of hours of their time... Your entitlement is just breathtaking. Please find a way to improve yourself, the situation is dire.
Treat it as a data point and make your own decisions (he does back it up with several sources that indicate a workaholic mentality with that expectation for others). Hiding it ends up perpetuating the behavior unseen.
*Below is an aside that explains why I think it's better to air these things even if it seems like "rumors and gossip."
I know first hand how toxic some people are irl compared to their public persona. There was a professor in my department during my PhD who was known to be a slave driver, but there are no accounts of it outside of the department. We would have to warn incoming students about working with her, though sometimes they wouldn't believe it could be as bad as we said. I spoke with one of her students after she left the lab due to being hospitalized for exhaustion from overwork: the professor contacted her while she was still hospitalized and asked her to complete a task ffs!
> This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product
The article seems to be happy about the switch to Rust, that point is re-iterated multiple times in the article, and seemingly they were both awaiting Bun moving away from Zig and wishing for it.
I feel the same way as you do. Honestly, even though it was well-packaged, I did find it a bit rude. But since I don't know their personal relationship, it's not really my place to interfere.
I understand your anger too. AI did steal open source knowledge, and I agree with that part.
But separately from that, I think it's a bit unfair to talk about the people associated with it in such a dismissive way.
In reality, humans aren't purely rational beings, and I can understand why the Zig philosophy and the Bun manager who joined the AI side might not have looked good from that perspective. But I think that's a separate issue from the emotions involved.
It's not just in the past, and my anger isn't just about what was taken, but the community-destroying use it is being put to: Andrew's job isn't to make a JS runtime, it's to sell the idea that coding is dead.
When he made it his job to sell that narrative, he declared war on me. It should not surprise him or anyone else that I am going to take the war right back to his doorstep.
There are some points I understand rationally but find hard to agree with emotionally.
What I understand rationally is the claim that AI is destroying your garden and community. It's an undeniable fact that intellectual property and the associated disruption are happening. That's simply true.
But what I find hard to agree with emotionally is that personal attacks aren't always justified just because of that. I've also been affected by AI. I had to create a new homepage because the traffic to my technical blog dropped due to AI. Of course, there are also benefits. As a non-native English speaker, it opened up a new path for me to access good programming resources, which I couldn't easily get before. So I have both affection and resentment.
Still, I understand your feelings. Because for you, the emotional anger of having something you built destroyed without any compensation is real. Our situations are different.
That said, I don't think that necessarily justifies attacking individuals.
People often think of blogs and homepages as places to write 'personal stories.' But once they're made public, they carry responsibility. And Andrew Kelly is a public figure—his words spread easily. So there needs to be a certain level of responsibility when writing.
Again just to make the nuance clear: nothing I've built has been destroyed. What makes me red hot angry is the message that there's nothing left to build -- that the world will soon belong to the people who just mindlessly copy (Jarred and his ilk). They have been quite crystal clear in their message to me: not using AI makes me worthless garbage to be taken to curb, a snack for anyone using AI.
You see how many times people can tell YOU that you are worthless garbage before you start thinking, "I'm going to punch back at the people who punch me." 20? 50? 100 times you get punched in the face before you start to consider self-defense? Cause I've read that piss-poor message 50 times: "you will be replaced."
Your skills and knowledge aren't your entire worth. I think you're a perfectly fine person. They just said cruel things that hurt you. Don't let that define you.
I actually think if people become mindless AI imitators, creative people like you will become even more competitive. Of course, I think you can still be creative even while using AI, but the kind of creativity we're talking about is just different.
Why bother fighting them? They're just people who are anxious themselves. I don't think you need to waste your energy defending yourself over such a pointless issue.
The claim that you're useless trash just because you don't use AI is wrong. AI is just one kind of workflow. You and they just didn't click.
As for people calling me useless trash, well, I hear that all the time. It's part of the freelancer life. But even so, that's just their opinion. I don't think of myself that way.
It's just that our environment makes things painfully difficult for us, my friend.
I'm sorry you had to go through those cruel messages. But I don't think they define you. You're a perfectly capable person, capable of intelligent conversation. You just chose not to adopt one particular workflow. That's not your problem.
If we keep talking, we might just end up hurting each other's feelings, so let's stop here and take a deep breath. Have a good day
It's really sad to see my fellow FOSS enthusiasts adopt this very strange vocabulary from the anti-pirate people. No, no one has stolen anything, the knowledge is still out there. No, you cannot even "shameless copy" from something that is asking the world to copy from it. Literally the point for me and others is that what we put out can be used by anyone for anything, that's why we use FOSS licenses in the first place.
But of the points is that no-one owes anyone anything, if you use my code I don't owe you support or anything else and by you using it, you owe me nothing either, no money, effort or anything else. Sure, if the maintainer want, it's nice when people fix the issues for the maintainer, as long as they want it, or that people and companies donate when maintainer set that up, but in no way should that be an expectation just because the creator slapped a FOSS license on what they made public. Don't want people to (mis)use, criticize, mangle, transform or copy what you've created? Don't use those licenses then.
This whole "no warranties" and its related intentions goes both ways, intentionally.
I just think you're fighting a losing battle. I'm pretty apathetic about it because I've never wanted to do anything but give away my stuff anyway. It only has value in my/your head most of the time.
I think how deeply you care about this and the way you castigate other people is unhealthy and it is critical for your own well-being that you come to terms with it.
"An unprofessional embarrassment" is exactly how I feel about Bun.
I don't get mad at people for standing up for their morals, I get mad when they have none. AI is an a-moral tech, and Bun is using it in an a-moral way: for team Bun the ends justify any means.
No, it's embarrassing being obsessed with good tone to the point that people behaving badly should never be called out for it.
The article provides good background into how it got to this point - and it fits well with doing an opportunistic AI rewrite after being acquired by an AI provider.
It is not about good tone it's about not being hateful and rude. Why is this that hard to pick apart?
Why do devs believe being rude is somehow a sign of honesty? They are orthogonal. This post needed none of the mean-spirited attacks that it contained to make its points. It is only hurt by the attacks as seen by the focus on "tone" throughout these comments.
Agreed. This article should have stuck to the cold facts, rather than a series of personal criticisms that you wouldn’t see written out in the workplace.
Sadly there are far too many open source developers out there who are far too comfortable writing like this. It’s one reason I have stopped being active in open source. You would be fired (or at least disciplined) from any reasonable workplace if you acted like this.
> It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig when it really just makes them look childish.
Antirez made a post equivalent to: you'd be a fool not to use AI to increase test coverage.
Zig on the other hand has embarrassingly low test coverage given its adoption and time in development.
Their stance on AI is completely childish. They could benefit massively from it, yet refuse to even consider any potential usage.
It's one thing to try to stop PR spam. It's another thing to tie your hands behind your back and not even use it internally for the lowest hanging fruit where it could have major benefits.
They could use AI to triage potential real bugs from PR spam... but instead they just let real bugs go unnoticed for longer than need be because they won't even use AI to help triage...
Surveys show that 60% of US adults don't like it which means 40% either don't care or do. I'd advise not getting your ideas about sentiment towards it from places like HN which are very biased and unrepresentative places of anything.
I find the anti crowd increasingly to be hateful and close-minded and it is disappointing because I have a lot of friends in it. There's a moral puritanism which gives people feelings that they are on the "right" side and thus any level of rudeness or hatred is justified and it only hurts their SIDE.
I am fine with people having principles and doing things their way. Not everything has to be a race to be the best. There are still plenty of people that appreciate traditional crafts. Anyway, if Zig+AI can be the next, greatest thing, can't someone just fork it and make it happen?
Unprofessional? Maybe a little, but honest, and while the truth isn't flattering to Jarred, I'd say generally kind.
Embarrassing? Not from my seat. Andrew is just revealing the relationship dynamics between a principled programming language developers and pragmatic business users of that language.
I had already inferred a bunch that this post confirms based on the agentic port from forked-Zig to Rust. It's very nice to have suspicions confirmed.
> It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig
I'm not sure that's his aim here. I imagine he has been asked dozens of times what he thinks about the switch, what it means for Zig, etc. etc. and wanted to just address it one time, which is understandable.
The tone is... strong. I think repeating grapevine rumours about Jarred's management skills adds very little and probably could have been removed. But at its heart I see this post as example of a common clash: open source code hackers vs Silicon Valley "growth hackers".
Kelley is disappointed that a promising Zig project took VC money and went from his passion project's prime example to one that shit talked it on the way out. I get why he's emotional. I wouldn't have written it the way he did but I also don't think policing tone is beneficial for honest communication.
I don't think it's too bad, but I also don't think it's good.
I also don't think Andrew can claim at the end "I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred" when the post includes the sentence "Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs".
Before the post I didn't know what zig and bun is. I needed a llm to explain it to me. Now I think about trying Zig. So, no, I don't think it's childish. It reads like a engineer that knows which kind of people you don't need in your environment. I can feel every word he wrote because I know this situations.
> This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product.
Well, TFA has a conveniently titled section "Addressing the Blog Post", that raised (setting aside speculation) some good points:
The [Bun rewrite] blog post is ... almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article ...
There's a dichotomy being presented here where you have to either choose a "style guide" or a programming language feature in order to avoid bugs. The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it ...
[TigerBeetle] put in the time to find and eliminate the bugs, they make an effort to maintain a healthy relationship with ZSF, and Bun did not do that.
The argument for shipping all the million lines of unreviewed code is that the test suite is good enough to catch everything. Then why are you saying you have so many annoying bugs in the Zig code? What happened to the test suite being sufficient to catch everything ...
Performance increase is attributed to LTO, which Zig has supported for all of Bun's existence. It used to be enabled by default until we ran into too many LLVM bugs, all of which also affect Rust ...
The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.
The blog post outlines a bunch of engineering work done to reduce binary size, to better make the case that "Bun is better in Rust" ... you were doing the engineering work that you should have done in the Zig codebase since the beginning ...
I noticed that you neglected to mention compilation speed. Zig compiler project is about 600,000 lines of code - roughly the same size as Bun before the rewrite, and I'm clocking 16s to build from scratch with a clean cache, followed by 90ms for each subsequent edit with incremental compilation enabled. What are the corresponding measurements of Bun post-rewrite?
I agree and I’m confused that some other commenters aren’t seeing it. Some of these lines are what I’d expect from an edgy teen lashing out in a private Discord venting session, not an adult making a public post on a highly visible tech topic:
> The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.
This isn’t about wanting “sanitized corpo-speak” or something, but I do expect leads of projects to behave like adults and not build arguments on ad-hominem attacks and rumors they supposedly heard.
Address the topic and put forth some arguments. I don’t care to hear your personal beef with someone aired publicly.
> Two, I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred
That’s quite a statement to make at the end of a post that seems to contain little else…all just thinly veiled.
Saying someone has „beginner energy“ but reframing it as a faux positive (this person fails and thus learns)
Or saying the grapevine says someone is a „stinky manager“? Basically I’m not saying this person is bad it’s just that I need to bring up on this blog that everyone agrees this person is bad.
I'm quite confused by this. Is calling someone a "stinky manager" a personal attack? It's funny that we can't differentiate the person from his "job". I work with some shitty managers, but I don't hold it against them on a personal level...
Don’t think there is a clear line to draw as to where the person stops and the professional performance starts when it comes to management because on soft skill it is inherently driven by personal attributes. It’s a bit like a good salesman exudes likeability - it’s integral to the performance of the job and part of the person.
He may well be a shit manager. I have no idea. Either way it’s not something you casually throw out there in a blog like this
> "Oven is going to be a grind, especially the first nine months or so. If work-life balance means a lot of time spent not working, it's probably not a good fit."
You do your job for hours every week, it is undoubtedly part of you. Calling somebody that is very personal and rude. I'm shocked that there are this many people who don't find issue with it. It removes any kindness from the post and turns it all up to 11. I's deeply personal.
Do some of you really talk to others like this and find no issue with it? It's hard to say words like that and not end up with deep schisms and hatred.
It’s an inconsistent statement to make when the rest of the article contains ad hominem attacks like these:
> The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.
This is a weirdly childish post. I enjoy a good post where someone speaks their mind without running it through the corporate speak filter first, but it also gives you insights into how a person thinks and operates. With good leadership you can strip away the corporate filter and the result is still professional, but this article reveals something much less than professional
> So, when the Anthropic aquisition finally happened, we at ZSF breathed a sigh of relief. When the donation silently stopped, our bank account was ready for it. When they neither canceled their monthly meeting with us, nor showed up, we were not surprised. The relationship was over.
Seen this time and time again, project/organization gets taken over, and everything "good" they did doesn't get exited with fanfare or anything, just silently dropped as your benefactor starts silently ignoring you.
I'm really happy they saw the writing on the all and were prepared for the inevitable, a really great lesson you shouldn't need to learn yourself the hard way, and FOSS project relying on one/two big donators should take heed, we'll see a lot more of this in the developer tooling ecosystem moving forward for sure.
I found this post very refreshing! I’m sure it would have been very tempting to one-up the “PR-speak” of the Bun post. Likewise, it would have been very tempting to include the same set of facts that reflect negatively on Jarred, while studiously concealing one’s own opinion (eg “I heard people called him a stinky manager. I am not saying that, other people are, but I’m not”). I appreciated that it was just … genuine.
I don't think you are using that right. Saying someone is bringing a bad vibe to your project, as the point he has a bad vibe is just stating the conclusion.
Like if someone calls you a bad programmer and doesn't hire you as a programmer, isn't ad hominem
No, the discussion started with a the article from Bun, stating that rust has some technical advantages for them. The response from the Zig creator is a bunch of personal attacks directed at one guy, like calling him a stinky manager. All of these are fully unrelated to which language is better for Bun.
This is like the textbook definition of an ad hominem.
Ad Hominem is only a fallacy when the speaker's personal qualities are irrelevant to the topic at hand. When one man has unilateral control over a project, you have to consider it as an extension of their personality.
To be pedantic the ad hominem fallacy is about trying to deny an argument by attacking the author, so in a discussion about zig Vs rust if Andrew isn't trying to enter the discussion and just argue "that guy was stinky, glad he is gone" is not really an ad hominem, just not classy let's say.
But he is. Both in the title, and in later half of the blog post, he directly enters that discussion. I'm not saying an ad hominem argument is always bad, but this clearly is one.
Right I think the correct term is “character assassination”. It starts by calling him a novice, goes on to call him a “stinky manager”, and then lands the deepest cut possible in this profession: his code sucks. At least Kelley thanked him for his money.
This is not refreshing, I usually expect better from Kelley. The best move would have been to say nothing at all except “best of luck, Zig will miss him but”. Now all Ziglings must wonder if they’re going to receive a hit piece from the Zig founder if they cross him.
Do you think that all ziglings refuse to write idiomatic code, have public fights with the language maintainers, and then write giant blog posts about how they're ditching the language because it just isn't good enough?
Part of it might feel like ad hominem, but I think the bluntness is justified in this case. It provides some pretty important context on the situation.
As an outside observer who knew little about Zig and Bun, the impression I got is that the rewrite came out of nowhere, and that the Zig community was surprised by it. The post makes it quite clear that this wasn't the case, and describes how the actions and overall mentality of Bun's creator already suggested such a thing was likely to happen, straight from the mouth of someone who worked with him and isn't afraid to voice his thoughts. Not everything needs to be PR speak.
There are astute comments about the post's tone elsewhere in this thread[0]
But this killed my hopes for Zig.
The drama is fun, and Andrew is maybe even admirable in his earnest, but this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project. I know that's boring and uninspired, but that's what I want my tech stack and it's management to be.
Also, maybe Jarred was a net negative, but bun was also a really big project using Zig, and the project leaving isn't as good for Zig as Andrew is making it seem. It genuinely seems he's putting a lot of priority on purity and ideology over just growth of the language. And I am sorry, but adoption and reaching critical mass is an important part of a serious programming language.
> this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project
I don't immediately see how much the seriousness of the project is related to the language the author chose in their personal blog post. It's similar to saying that Linux could not have become a serious project because of the way Linus communicated in his emails.
He is understandably annoyed. It feels like you are making it a problem for people to have emotions and give signs that they have those emotions. He didn’t even write anything direct and it is on his personal blog
In what way the article convinced you that Andrew Kelley is not professional enough for a serious project like Zig? Isn't his contribution to the language what's important?
He's leading the community. Not having basic professional does indeed kill them vibe for some of us. When is he going to pile on somebody else he disagrees with?
Zig's community is - bar none - the least toxic programming community I've experienced. People on this website (who have never witnessed a single Zig community interaction) love to read blogposts from afar and come to conclusions this way and that, but if they ever stopped to actually engage with the people involved they'd find out the truth quite easily.
> this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project
I actually think this gets to, but steps over, the core objection: traditional "hacker" mindset vs VC "growth hacking" mindset.
> And I am sorry, but adoption and reaching critical mass is an important part of a serious programming language.
Why? Why can't he create a language with exactly the kind of purity and ideology he wants, broader adoption be damned? Why must everything optimize for user growth and mindshare?
> And I am sorry, but adoption and reaching critical mass is an important part of a serious programming language.
Would you argue that Chez Scheme (to pick a random example) isn't a "serious programming language"? And I am sorry, but the assumption that "explosive growth" in the venture capital sense is somehow necessary for "success" is cancer.
Not sure a personal attack against Jarred really helps the case for using Zig. He could have and should have focused on the language and not “a stinky manager”. Honestly, this makes me want to steer clear of Andrew as much as Jarred.
Its an attack an Jarred's public, (un)professional behaviour.
One most of us in the community have born witness too in recent months.
"Jarred, in his professional capacity, drove away many from our community, and we'd prefer to disassociate."
is not 'Jarred is a bad person, privately'.
Now, in these circles, that might as well be the same thing, given how little personal life I imagine most VCs have left outside of work. But that's not really Andrew's problem.
I won't defend Andrew's style; I think he could mask some his neurodivergence more when communicating to a wider neurotypical audience. But it's his project, his community is certainly aware, and this too, is a known quantity.
It might help you though, to reread the piece with the assumption that Andrew is being completely sincere, without adding in a secondary subtext like, "Andrew is trying to assassinate Jarred's character".
I think he’s being completely sincere in this attempt to assassinate this person’s character. I say this as someone who before this day regarded Kelley as a role model. Now I see him in the same category as a Musk like character. Don’t blame “unmasked neurodivergence” for this, plenty of neurodivergent people can communicate effectively and professionally to a wide audience without attacking someone’s professional character.
For example, given the number of claims made here there’s very little actual evidence and support. Kelley says Jared is a bad manager and credits rumors. He says he writes slop code and doesn’t provide a single example or prove that statement. If this were his “neurodivergence” coming through I’d expect more thorough argument and less “stinky manager” grade school insults.
Andrew's online social behavior is largely a streak of pettiness imo. This is not even close to the first time I've seen him write something I felt was overtly mean spirited, not just euphemistically "blunt".
It's hard, in my opinion, to lend credence to the author here when they decided to devote the first and largest section of their article to an incisive display of speculative ad hominem.
Would have been a great opportunity to outline the benefits of Zig! I've been keen to pick Zig up recently due to mitchellh's evangelism and inspiring writing on the subject.
> first and largest section of their article to an incisive display of speculative ad hominem.
Seems you're not alone in feeling this, mind quoting the exact and verbatim parts that seem like "speculative ad hominem"? I see there are quite a bits about how Andrew sees Jarred and his workflow/work mentality, but I'm not sure I see clearly what is supposed to be the ad hominem, speculative or not.
Casting aspersions without proof, even if it's something everyone knows, is in poor taste and ad hominem. I've never heard a bad word about Jaredd before, so Andrew seems more like a stinky person to me right now.
Personal and professional are not mutually exclusive.
If I criticize your code, that is a professional criticism.
If I criticize your code and say it reflects your consistent carelessness and stupidity, it is also personal.
If I say you fabricated something, then that is a personal criticism, it alleges an ethical violation. In a professional context, it's also a professional criticism (every profession has some ethical standards).
Can you criticize a project which is mainly contributed and managed by one person without criticizing the same person who does the decisions that cause criticisms?
Yes, I think very easily and I have read examples of this. There are bits of this in the article, but the main thrust attempt to portray Jarred as a greedy asshole enamored with Thiel/VC thought is not about the project and quite clear reading the article. It’s entirely tactless and bitter imo
> main thrust attempt to portray Jarred as a greedy asshole enamored with Thiel/VC thought
What made you get that takeaway from the article? I didn't get that feeling at all, mainly seems to be something like "Jarred does some good and some bad, personally I don't agree, still wish him well", but clearly some specific part in the article must have given you this impression, if so what part?
The "some good" part reads like it exists as a buffer between other parts which don't sound objective, but rather defensive and personally angry.
> Fun fact: people talk to each other.
The intention here seems to indicate that Jared could've never known that could happen. It doesn't sound like professional feedback and more how you talk to someone during after a road rage incident.
And the fact that immediately after no "personal criticism" he proceeds to call his behavior "fantasy fever dream." Sometimes presentation matters as much as factuality.
The lack of sources and citation for a pretty one-sided claim doesn't help either.
> jumping head first into problems that he was not yet equipped to solve, leading to mediocre outcomes in terms of engineering
> having graduated from the Thiel Fellowship school of thought rather than university, he was essentially groomed from a young age into uncritically embracing the Silicon Valley mindset,
> this "beginner energy" started to hit differently for me. It's one thing to choose a poor work-life balance for oneself; a different thing entirely to demand it of others
> Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience
> gets to live out his productivity fantasy fever dream, he's probably already super wealthy. He has minor tech celebrity status.
Frankly, I have trouble seeing how a neutral reader doesn’t see this as a clear personal attack. That the article ends with “I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred” is almost comical given the preceding paragraphs.
And literally 3 sentences later he goes back to insulting him ("productivity fantasy fever dream"). Even if that is true, it's still an unwise post to publish in this form IMHO. If the goal was to defend Zig, that could've been done in a less personal manner.
I think he messed that part up and it comes off as passive aggressive but he is probably scared of the “outrage” from the angels of the internet about how rude he was to Jarred
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.
I don't see anything business related in that statement.
What's this new level of gaslighting? "It was not because of me, but because of the business situation I was in". Wait... wasn't he in that "business situation" because of actions HE took?
To me, this whole effort of rewriting Bun from Zig to Rust looks like a big marketing move. The question is: if Anthropic AI is really that powerful, why not just fix the bugs and give it the more ambitious task of redesigning the existing Bun Zig codebase in a way that eliminates not only the current bugs but also prevents similar ones from happening in the future?
I think that post highlights a difference in philosophical approach to software development. Bun is focused on moving fast and will deal with the consequences as they come. Zig takes a more planful approach.
I've experienced both in my career and I fall solidly on the planful side. It's why stopped using homebrew and I've avoided huggingface packages as much as possible.
If you use Rust the way it was designed to be used, rather than relying on countless "unsafe" blocks, you need to redesign the entire codebase architecture to make it compatible with the borrow checker rules.
The borrow checker really isn't that bad. It isn't like they were porting from something with GC. They were already having to think about these things anyway. Even then opus seems to have no difficulty going between c# and rust while respecting the idioms of both. No unsafe needed. Zig should be even easier except the lack of a training corpus for whatever frankenversion of zig that bun was using.
All that unsafe does in these cases is enable the "unsafe super-powers" which the compiler can't check, thus shifting the responsibility onto the author. But for example if you've got some code which doesn't borrow check, and you just sprinkle unsafe keywords on it, now you've got code which still doesn't borrow check and diagnostics telling that this unsafe keyword was futile and you should remove that.
I haven't reviewed this code, but the percentages described don't sound like they'd need a huge architectural overhaul to use much less unsafe, it might take more actual human effort than they want though.
Even if you “rely on countless unsafe blocks”, unsafe is additive, it gives access to additional APIs which are not checked. It does not disable affine types, the borrow checker, or send/sync traits. Unless the entire codebase is unsafe (e.g. fresh out of c2rust) it’s very hard to not have more guarantees.
And because unsafe is generally highly local or localizable reasoning (conventionally backed by safety justifications) it really is quite reasonable to go plugging at it, or task an AI within that.
For 99.99% of cases, you're reading and writing this under an operating system whose kernel is written in a language without send/sync, and inside a browser that also largely written in languages without send/sync, because those systems are fundamentally well designed. So instead of fixing the bugs and rethinking the architecture, the author of Bun decided to transpile almost the entire codebase from Zig to Rust without a deep architectural review. Okay...
Those systems you're alluding to received ungodly amounts of work and resources, vastly more than most projects can ever hope for, and yet they're still full of holes and security exploits. You're unwittingly making a great argument against using C, C++ – or Zig.
Those systems are primarily written in C or C++-but-in-C-style, right? Without exploiting RAII among other features, as Jarred mentioned that he liked in Rust. While Rust took RAII from C++.
What I mentioned is only a tiny part of the entire software, which has been successfully written in C, C++, and now in Zig as well, and is used daily by people around the world.
If you are writing in C-like codebase and aren't tracking lifetimes and ownership at least as well as a borrow checker you're opening yourself to CVEs.
You can't do "redesigning the existing Zig code in a way that eliminates not only the current bugs but also prevents similar ones from happening in the future" without actually changing Zig itself.
> The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it.
Perhaps the amount of bugs comes from using a C-like language that requires meticulous manual care to avoid writing runtime bugs.
Even C++ would be a safer choice because of RAII.
When you have to dedicate significant resources to avoid/fix runtime issues that are made impossible at compile time by other languages, the programmer isn't entirely at fault.
Memory safety problems are still possible in the new Rust Bun:
At the time of writing, about 4% of Bun's Rust code sits inside an unsafe block (~13,000 unsafe keywords across ~27,000 lines / ~780,000 lines), and 78% of those blocks are a single line — a pointer that came from C++, or one call into a C library.
People bring this up a lot. What I see here is that thousands of potentially (not actually, just potentially) safety risks have been neatly tagged in the code.
If you took a program written in Zig, Go, C++, or C, you would have no idea which parts of the code were potentially unsafe. In those languages, the entire program is one big unsafe{} block.
Rust isolates unsafe code. Having them explicitly tagged means they're isolated and can be eradicated over time, if need be. Though in many cases, unsafe blocks are quite safe.
Yes - I think the proof of the pudding will be whether they put in the effort to eliminate these unsafe blocks. The conversion to Rust is the starting point that makes this possible, but it's definitely not "done" at this point.
Suppose there's a C library libape which implements monkeys you need in your software. There's a C API where we pass a pointer to a valid monkey and a 32-bit unsigned integer which controls how delicious bananas are. Any 32-bit unsigned integer is valid here, except zero because monkeys always think bananas are at least somewhat delicious, and there's no return value.
Our Rust wrapper probably has Monkey as a type, wrapping one of those valid monkey pointers we mentioned, and so our wrapper for that API call is some unsafe code which just calls the C with this monkey pointer and a non-zero unsigned 32-bit integer which in Rust is just the type NonZeroU32 and we're done. That's a single line, the unsafety checking was all done in Rust's type system, every Monkey has a valid monkey pointer, every NonZeroU32 is (as its name suggests) a non-zero unsigned 32-bit integer.
Now on the other hand, maybe we're wrapping code which takes a char * pointer intended to point at some zero terminated ISO-8859-1 encoded text. That Rust wrapper would be responsible for this translation and maybe you do that work in the wrapper function. But, if you had sixty calls like that, probably you make a Rust type for this problem named like Iso8859dash1Text and then those unsafe calls don't have a lot of boilerplate because all that boilerplate (which is probably even safe Rust depending on how exactly you do it) lives in this Iso8859dash1Text type you made. And that's also a useful model if later you discover the C library lied and it's not ISO-8859-1 it's really Windows Codepage 1252 ...
Possible, yes. But it's not like it's terribly difficult to verify correct usage of "unsafe" that amounts to a basic function call to a C library. Trivial uses of unsafe are pretty innocuous.
Yes but through iterative ratcheting, some portion of that unsafe can likely be migrated to idiomatic code without unsafe. And the other 96% of the code now has more mechanical guarantees than it did before.
Static linting in Rust via clippy also makes it pretty straightforward to begin enforcing things like "unsafe blocks need to have safety doc comments" as a CI warning or failure, and there are community tools that focus on this topic too.
I can't stand the practice of "LLM porting" personally but if you're going to do a mechanical rewrite from something else into Rust, this (permit unsafe and unidiomatic but 1:1 translation at first) is a fairly reasonable strategy imo.
You have to put similar amount of resources when writing in Rust as well. With the difference that it’s more front loaded. Personally I’m a fan of Rust’s approach but the price for having bug free code has to be paid, regardless, one way or the other.
I’ve not seen any languages that does not require meticulous care to avoid runtime bugs. Type checking and lifetime ownership eliminate some, but not all of them.
> Type checking and lifetime ownership eliminate some, but not all of them.
They actually remove certain classes completely. E.g. lifetime ownership in Rust removes all bugs related to the reason why it is in the code syntax (a.k.a. lifetime markers remove use-after-free completely in Rust.)
That "I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred" made me do a spit take, because a majority of what I had just read was absolutely a personally targeted criticism of Jarred.
Whether that's "okay" is a totally separate issue. I have no idea what the history here is, or whether this is warranted. But that was absolutely a personal criticism!
Despite stated otherwise in the post, this is a personal attack.
Anyway, let's try to discuss something more technical: I predict Zig will lose steam, and in 2027, will lose relevance:
1) It's hardcore Anti-AI
2) It's moved to Codeberg
3) It doesn't have the momentum to sustain the disadvantages of these two decisions
The project will in max 2 years make a blog post, not admitting to their mistakes, telling themselves that Zig is a success, despite the industry having moved on.
If you bothered to actually learn just a little bit about the Zig project, you'll know that they are doing ok. They never cared about introducing new features at a fast speed, having lots of contributors, or getting corporate sponsorship, if that's not already obvious from the article. In fact, they intentionally keep a distance from all of that to make the project more sustainable and less prone to the whims of corporations.
They don't have a goal of becoming a popular language, though and will continue to work on it as long as there are donations.
They don't care about being mainstream and there are niche companies who appreciate Zig and donate.
To be honest, I'm also leaning this way, especially because of the hardcore anti-AI stance, so much that Zig will close security vulnerability issues on Codeberg if you mention that they were found with LLMs. I don't think that this is a good approach.
I also think Zig has a rough road ahead, but not because of AI or moving to codeberg. No, it's because Andrew isn't really a BDFL. He's at best a DFL. The project is already mostly closed off to external contributors.
It kind of reminds me of Elm in a way. Though I'm not expecting 6 years of drought just yet.
Linus attacked bad software, Andrew attacks the Thiel Fellowship, VC Foundings, and AI. There's little or no Linus there, pointing fingers at, and even when he does, he points at code he neither uses nor maintains. Linus don't give a shit about other people projects and businesses.
It's a conflict of core values, and you've demonstrated it here.
You have defined success (for a project, and possibly a person too) as solely 'relevance'.
Jarred would agree with you wholeheartedly, I imagine.
Andrew would ask you to leave.
It's okay to have different values and part ways.
It's not wise, however, to project your personal values onto other people, and judge them on those fabricated merits. You'll end up frustrated and confused more often than not.
Judge their choice of values. Judge them on their alignment with their chosen values.
As an example, Andrew doesn't like Jarred's chosen 'Silicon Valley' values, but thinks that Jarred aligns himself well with those values. This feels as a personal attack to you who also holds those values. And on some level, a person intimating you core values suck couldn't be more personal.
Your prediction is extremely short sighted, and I can only guess it is because of your extreme pro-AI stance, as well as not being part of the open-source community.
Nothing against Pro AI but their stance on wanting to write code by hand is not bad either. AI does over complicate things and there's a lot of slop. For a systems programing language, AI doesn't sound like a right fit. I'm personally tempted to reduce the dependency on AI. IMO, after a while, the overall productivity plateaus.
I do hope they keep their stance and philosophy though it is not the easiest with a BDFL governance. I do not have predictions though, it seems silly to try and do so when it will be a random chance outcome
I was wrong to be upset this whole time that the rewrite would hurt Zig. This is one of those rare occasions when I’m glad I was wrong. Interesting insights.
I don't think Bun actually matters much, even for web development. For sure there is a lot of enthusiasm, but all the production systems I know continue to use Node.js and are not moving to Bun any time soon. In the "real world" not that many people care about it.
I find this sad, as I use Bun as a Node.js replacement that works really well. I wanted improved builds times and run speed. Both things bun provided. It reduced ram usage and worked with the node ecosystem well.
So for some workflows it looked like a flat improvement on all parts.
A better title would be 'My emotions on the Bun Rust Rewrite', since the article feels like an emotional reaction rather than a thoughtful analysis of the situation. Give it some time..
I'm rooting for Zig either way, even though I have nothing against Rust and I don't directly use bun.
> You can imagine how we might want to put some social distance between ourselves and a project whose irresponsible software engineering practices invite the exact kind of criticism that people are eager to level.
The other (very salient) points notwithstanding, I'm afraid this quote shows that Zig hasn't learned a lesson that other languages of its generation (and older) have: if a project's memory safety depends only on "responsible engineering practices", then that project most likely won't be memory safe. Quoting the "swiss cheese" model used in risk management: one slice of cheese (engineering practices) just isn't enough if you want to be reasonably sure your program is memory safe.
I’m reminded of the hierarchy of controls in machine safety. If you can’t eliminate the hazard, or substitute a less hazardous thing, then engineering out the hazard (like Rust did) is preferable to a procedural control (“git gud at engineering”).
C/C++ with static code analysis is not worse than Rust. But most Rust developers are beginners during there are many C/C++ developers with 20+ years knowledge. So whats exactly is the point in using Rust?
Can you elaborate on the distinction between "eliminate the hazard" as the first choice and "engineering out the hazard" as a fallback approach?
In my safety background (recently aerospace, ARP4754/4761), removing and avoiding the hazard are essentially equivalent, with reducing the likelihood and mitigating its effects acceptable if you can't remove or avoid the hazard, and procedure is also the least preferred mechanism.
C/C++ does not care and they’re currently the language for foundational work (OS, platforms, and libraries). Python and Java does not care, they will just throw runtime exceptions and crash. Rust care, but they don’t play well with the rest of the world.
rust is currently making its way into linux kernel, core contributors even did rust conf talks...windows already has rust going into kernel and core libraries, osx is also adopting rust, its making its way into all those 'foundational works' you're talking about.. so i'm pretty confused what you are saying
"If this was a tweet people would be fine with it"
Actually, some folks do care about how the leader and public face of a project conduct themselves regardless of venue. If a different public figure ie some CEO wrote something reprehensible about some particular ethnic group, is it more excusable or forgivable if they did it on their personal social media account rather than the company blog? Same basic thing.
Public writing in a personal space is still public writing. Being held accountable for publicly stated views is an inherent part of sharing them in public, no?
I do not think the original blog post demands a reply. Zig people have already written about this. I found the original blog post quite complimentary of Zig and the community.
It is challenging for me to imagine how one would think an article like this is net beneficial for the community rather than reacting with grace.
Jared has behaved appallingly in recent months. Comments about locking out humans from open source code contributions and the gaslighting at the start of the migration are top of mind.
well, for me personally, "the" Zig project is not Bun but Ghostty, and it always has been.
yeah, Mitchell is very pro-AI, but he is thoughtful, and he sometimes highlights the difference between Zig's and Ghostty's approaches to LLMs (outright ban vs taming)
Yeah and Andrew Kelley is anti AI for his project because it’s counter to the projects learning goals. I think it’s perfectly fine for a project to determine if AI contributions are accepted. Maybe that means change is slower in that project, maybe that means things are more deliberate too.
OSS projects can survive not being on GitHub, Python was something like 20 years was not on gh. If the service has severe outages and there are alternatives why wouldn’t you move? Most people aren’t contributing to the runtime anyways, they are just using the language.
Andrew could have been more tactful in his blog post (though as I've grown older I often find less tact to be more effective), but it really sounds like accommodating Bun was a net negative for Zig.
When Jarred joined the Zig community about 5 years ago, I described him as someone who had strong "beginner energy".
I wouldn't call it beginner energy, though I understand it might seem like that. Rather, it's an approach to development and no amount of time changes it.
Thank you Andrew for sharing your side of the story. We can see that the relationship with Bun and Jarred was far from easy. You say it with your own words and even if it sounds bitter I like it much more than some bland AI assisted content.
So is this guy going to dress down any project that decides to move off of Zig? If Mitchell Hashimoto decides to move Ghostty off of Zig to C or Rust will we get a scathing blog post about that too?
Dedicating most of the article to a personal attack and then finishing by saying that you don't have anything against the person is a bit of an odd sequence.
Am I right in thinking the Bun rewrite hasn't actually been released yet? There was a big kerfuffle when it was merged to master and people seemed to be behaving like that meant it was all done and dusted (as does this article), but it looks like the last release is still 1.3.14 from April so presumably general users are still on the Zig version? Is there a timeline for release?
Bun's bundler claimed the bottom place in my recent analysis of how JavaScript tools handle generating inline script tags[1], because despite making lofty promises about being able to bundle applications into standalone HTML files, it produced a baffling combination of spurious syntax errors and miscompilations when presented with tricky code.
I'm pretty sure the version I tested was the Zig one (have they made a stable release of the Rust rewrite yet?). So I can definitely see how Bun's move-fast-and-break-things philosophy would have been a poor fit for the Zig community, even prior to the Rust rewrite.
i think the blog post was very honest and direct and i could not agree more with andrew, now i’m not a zig user and i don’t find the language itself pleasing but it’s just a matter of taste,
i admire a few things in zig community, the focus on human relationship with learning and discovery and the focus on performance and building a meaningful relationship with members of community, I wish all the best to the zig and its community, although i have heard a few years ago that andrew was making apologies for not having enough diversity (race and skin colour wise) which i guess was a very dumb statement, but hey we all make dumb statements!
I really admire his stance on AI and agentic code contribution and the joy that they find in crafting good tools.
When I read about the bun rewrite I thought no sh*t, those are the exactly the types of bugs I would expect when doing a line by line rewrite of a program in a GC language to memory managed.
I was unimpressed with the engineering from the blog, and I'm not surprised to read andrew say they claimed no fuzz testing. I know someone who interviewed at bun when it was less than 10 people (around 5 he said). Allegedly jared lowballed the fk out of my friend, claimed they had no money because they're a startup, then proceeded to offer <1% equity
I think I'm missing something; neither zig nor rust are GC languages. Did bun originally start off in javascript or something, and the rewrite you're referring to is from JS to zig?
First line of the original article (not including the disclosure)
> Bun started as a line-for-line port of esbuild's JavaScript & TypeScript transpiler from Go to Zig
Then proceeded to talk about use after free bugs, leaks, and other things that wouldn't exist in GC written programs. Ironically, my friend jared lowballed is an expert in C, runtimes and threading
> The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.
Interesting I wonder if its something Jarred did locally or something else that was just not widely done by the whole team? I dont like to make bad assumptions about devs or dev teams without first asking. I owe credit to HN for one of the guidelines which states something like do not assume intentional malice in comments, I feel like we assume the worst in general about other devs, but people are imperfect and make mistakes.
That said as others noted this post could have been written a bit differently while still pointing out genuine issues. The ad hominem attacks are a bit unnecessary and add nothing of value to what could have been a better response.
Zig is getting that Elm, etc vibe. Genius/visionary BFDL who's also personally incapable of leading the project towards healthy long-term viability.
Say what you will about Matz or José Valim, I don't think they'd ever write a "and don't let the door hit you on the way out" screed full of personal attacks ("stinky manager", "writing slop", "a total shit show") against a person who led a very prominent project and financially supported the language.
Other people (not meaning this about you) very frequently seem to throw around the BFDL acronym uncritically without remembering or caring that Benevolent is the first word in there.
This blog post is mostly made up of pettiness and is not an isolated incident - he is often pretty "spicy" or downright hostile in comments sections when making an appearance.
I like zig a lot, I share its core philosophy, and I generally agree with Andrew's views. I found this article interesting, and I think it is understandable in all of this to be a bit bitter towards Bun and Jarred - in some sense, it had turned into a big "If you don't use Rust in 2026 you are stupid" which directly hurts the Zig project.
Personally, I prefer zig over most other languages. I find "memory-safety" is bought at the price of code that is not straightforward to reason about and requiring a steep learning curve. The reader's working memory is filled up quickly with language constructs and crutches rather than with the actual logic of the code at hand. I have used C++ for a large part of my professional career and eventually got so annoyed by always having to cross-reference multiple files to check which behavior might be used by which constructor and things like that. I have written a big and critical system in pure C once, just to try, and while I would not do it again, diligence and testing resulted in virtually zero runtime failures across its lifespan - while it was always possible to quickly reason about all the logic that tied low-level hardware access and near-realtime requirements together in a way much more visible than hidden behind layers of "safe" abstraction. Zig is, for me, the sweet spot: It solves the terrible issues that plain C has, and adds a lot of convenience on top that does not obscure the logic, while encouraging but not enforcing safe patterns.
I'm glad LLM coding exists for people who want to move at an insane superhuman speed (perhaps they're trying to achieve escape velocity and launch into the stars or something) so that they don't grind down their fellow humans.
You can either do local optimization - a single individual moving as fast and as hard as humanly possible, or global optimization - a team working together and amplifying each other's efforts to produce something that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Never heard of Bun or Jarred before today
I enjoyed his blog post about the migration to rust, it is an impressive feat if real ! I didnt see anything bad about Zig in the post, on the contrary it shows respect and that big projects can be done in Zig
Next, I read Andrew's post, and the thing I see is: Jarred looks like an achiever, Andrew more like a butthurt childish whiner
I also can see why Jarred made the migration, it is not only technical, and it was a great call IMHO
I for one appreciate a public figure with a wildly opposed mindset to the Silicon Valley/VC-Funded/Ultrascaling/whatever crowd.
The pushback is warranted and on point, especially the technical points. It has taken a suspicious amount of time to produce the fabled blog post which I don't think states almost any new information beyond what Jarred has already shared on twitter. The one (and very interesting) exception is the theoretical price of the rewrite via the API pricing.
Why do I feel like reading the post of someone jealous or with low self esteem issues? Zig was not a good fit so why does it have to be a personal attack on the Bun maintainer over his life choices and his management decisions? Whatever beef you have with someone it should not be « zig is for elite and you are just an evil corporate maintainer because you are holding it wrong »
It feels like the first half of blog post is less of "thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite" and more "I don't like Jarred, he's a bad programmer and manager".
Maybe I'm wrong, but it strongly feels this way. I'm not saying that Andrew is right or wrong, it's just that you could throw out most of the first half of the post and not lose anything actually on topic.
> But having graduated from the Thiel Fellowship school of thought rather than university, he was essentially groomed from a young age into uncritically embracing the Silicon Valley mindset, and he took venture capital.
> Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective.
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
Same. After following the drama on HN and Twitter it's pretty clear Jarred has been intentionally doing something that's hurting Zig/Bun community. What I've seen check out with those statements in the post
To me, most on HN have drank the AI koolaid (and/or are financially invested in it), and God forbid a direct and personal critique on a project owned by Anthropic!
You only need to follow Jarred/Bun's own comments on Twitter/HN to figure things out, where selective info were posted based on some agenda instead of clearing things up, aka communication
I find the pro-AI and anti-AI somewhat inconsistent, where I had either side strongly reacting to my comments. I personally didn't expect so much support for Bun in this thread.
I mean I wouldn’t want to work for Andrew Kelley either. Doesn’t mean I don’t see utility in zig. Taking swings at a pretty toxic culture (silicon valley) while refreshing also paints a target on your back. This isn’t unhinged shit though so it hasn’t dissuaded me from learning Zig
> The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it.
I was on a platform team and I had a constant backlog of bugs (introduced by others) that I was working on and the two most impactful things for preventing bugs were Typescript and Cypress (playwright-like testing before playwright).
I've dealt with many shitty code bases and the only way that worked for removing bugs was automation. It didn't matter how many bodies you threw at the problem.
> Then why are you saying you have so many annoying bugs in the Zig code? What happened to the test suite being sufficient to catch everything?
You can't use tests for trying to catch use after frees and other memory bugs for the same reason you can't use unit tests as a replacement for type checking, the combinatorial explosion of possible inputs into functions makes unit testing types across an entire project impossible.
Anyway, Jared donated $60k a year to this project and tried to resolve this in the most diplomatic way possible and still got personally attacked. The lesson from this article is don't donate to the Zig project because if you migrate away from it they will try to ruin your reputation.
While I understand ZSF's bittersweet relationship with Oven and agree to several points (especially preparedness), this writing is badly structured and that shows something. Hope to see him turning around.
Disclaimer: I'm bullish on Rust. And I think LLMs are overhyped, and kind of overhated.
Honestly, I think it would have been better if he had done the smart thing and ignored the noise around Bun's Zig -> Rust, and focused on code.
If he was willing to ride the coattails of Zig being hyped by Bun, then he should have taken the hit when Zig and Bun parted ways.
Hell, if he is that happy that they are leaving, he shouldn't have written that he is happy. Just smile and wave...
So now Jarred wrote a very matter-of-fact post about migrating Bun to Rust, and Andrew Kelley wrote a ranty blog about Jarred sucking at Zig, and being glad he's gone.
When you said that “His code was slop well before LLMs” got a good cackle out of me.
The fact is, most people don’t have taste and haven’t had taste, LLMs just amplify what was already there. Good taste is good taste, slop is slop, and shit is shit.
Nice writing by Andrew IMO, please don’t be discouraged by people criticizing the writing style, it is firmly on the lighter side of what I would expect. It even feels a bit passive aggressive to me so it would be better have a more direct and harsh writing style maybe?
As a side note, never trust someone saying they use fuzz testing just because they say so. Odds are they don’t even understand what fuzz testing is.
And it was glaringly obvious they don’t know how to program in this context from their complaints around memory safety. The issue should never that the code randomly segfaults, it should only be it maybe exploitable in an adversarial scenario.
For all comments that will write something like “I can’t believe how rude this is”:
No one really care about this, there are real problems in life, please get a grip, you are just being annoying
That is a 100% on point analysis, there was a lot of hype around Bun since the beginning when it was an invite only project. Arguably that same interest is what got Jarred VC funding in the first place.
Note that usage and public interest are not the same quantity, people also care about the potential of a project.
> We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks.
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
Ufff, the creator of zig saying that the biggest zig project is slop was definitly not on my bingo card.
Its sad to see that on of the biggest projects was more or less badly written zig code. On that note, I wonder which big project have good zig code?
I’m not sure why this post even exists? It feels completely unnecessary. Don’t get me wrong, I like drama as much as the next guy, but it didn’t have to be public imo
1.It felt uncomfortable that Bun was presented as a representative example of Zig. From the internal Zig perspective, it looked more like a bad example of how to use Zig.
2.It felt uncomfortable that they spoke as if Rust prevents things that could actually be handled by Zig's style guide.
3.I(OP,andrewkelly) don't think badly of Jarred as a person, but after signing a contract with VC, the management side has been poor.
4.The Bun documentation looked like marketing.
5.Bad contributions driven by AI came through indirect promotion of Bun, which attracted interest from people after it was acquired by Antropic.
I understand that it's burdensome to see Bun as Zig's representative success story, and I get the wish not to see Rust rewrites through a lens of language superiority. But on the flip side, I'm not sure I would have ever learned about Zig if not for Bun.
While the criticism is valid, I also understand Bun's position. After all, Antropic's acquisition of Bun was ultimately about showing that even a 'new language' can be used effectively with AI, and that's precisely where the friction arose.
I think the refusal to accept AI from a purely human programmer perspective is a matter of personal values, and I find the Zig team admirable on a human level. (Though I'm an active proponent of AI, so my view differs.)
Both sides have valid points, but sometimes I wish someone would turn the emotional and political dynamics of open source into a novel. I think it would be fascinating
> 2.It felt uncomfortable that they spoke as if Rust prevents things that could actually be handled by Zig's style guide.
"Handled by Zig's style guide" ends up as "Don't make mistakes" which is entirely useless advice. C++ spent years trying to make out that this constitutes useful guidance before gradually accepting that people aren't in fact going to stop making mistakes, you need to provide a better language and tools.
I agree with some points as well.
In fact, the OP argues that sufficient engineering attention can solve the problem, but I think that's only theoretical in reality, it's difficult.
It's like C programmers claiming that undefined behavior is manageable.
Not accepting a PR because it was purely written by AI is like saying PRs will only be accepted if the developer used a standing desk for more than 75% of the time during the code's creation. In the end, as long as the code is not shit, who cares how the sausage was made!
I find it hard to believe you actually think those two things are similar or equivalent. I've heard many bad analogies in my life but this is so funny that it makes me think you're being sarcastic.
>We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. Abuse of assertions. Most of all, recklessly speeding past feature after feature with very little time taken for reflection and elimination of bugs and technical debt.
I'd like to know what the poor code quality in Bun looks like. Does anybody have concrete examples?
The project needs an adult in the room - preferably someone less on the spectrum - who approves this content before it goes out. This reads as an incredibly butthurt, petulant rant, authored by someone deeply hurt that users are putting all the blocks into the square hole. Andrew would have been served better by a Linus-style curt takedown, rather than this drivel.
Are you implying that this reads as all those bad things because Andrew is supposedly autistic? And that if he were to not supposedly have autism, this post wouldn't have read as all those bad things? This reads as an incredibly ableist post authored by someone who thinks autism is an insurmountably negative thing and that someone with "sufficient" autism shouldn't run a project. As if autism is a percentage where once you get past 33% you immediately become incompetent. Be better.
The video he links to at the end is such a strong message, somehow able to celebrate the promise of AI while not afraid to point out whats complicated, or even fraught there. AI is, truly, a reflection of ourselves, our own hangups, prejudice, desire. Its both what draws us to it, but also inspires us to be critical. Thanks for the prescient reminder there OP.
While I agree that the Zig code in Bun could be better, and that the Silicon Valley pressure to move fast and break things prevented a lot of suggested improvements, this feels like the same argument as people who write C or C++ where people think they wouldn’t make mistakes.
For example this section
> We've been trying to warn you about your comptime abuse for years.
You could replace comptime with templates in C++ and it would be the same story. People will abuse features you put in the language. Is C++ a good language that people are just using wrong? According to Bjarne Stroustrup yes, and the C++ core guidelines fixes those issues, but a lot of people seem to disagree. Don't believe me here is an interview where he talks about memory safety in C++? ^1
> Ryan: One thing that I think C++ is uh infamous for is kind of like memory safety issues or kind of foot guns that exist there.
> Bjarne: I'm so tired of that. Um I haven't had those problems for years. Um, and somebody did a a study of the obvious problems with buffer overflows and um people hacking in using that kind of stuff and uh almost all of the uh these cases when people writing C style code or in C and uh Herb Server has a a talk with with actual numbers and they they are quite significant. It's it's sort of that kind of problems more than 90% are for people that don't write modern C++. They they use raw pointers to pass things around without um the number of elements. No fat pointers, no spans. um you you have them in C++. You can use them. You can use uh vectors. We have hardened libraries. Everybody has hardened libraries that that does the runtime checking. Uh Apple has it. Google has it. Microsoft has it. It's just not standard till now. C++ 26 has a hardened option that are standard. uh and the work I'm doing on profiles will give you a way of guaranteeing that you don't do the stupid things. Um so anyway, uh fundamentally theoretically the problem was solved many years ago and people just do what they've always done and get the problems they've always had. And uh that makes me sad and uh it's one of the things that makes me work on uh coding guidelines and on enforced profiles and on education. I mean education is one way to solve the problem. Is there a way to get the compiler to just prevent people from doing all those risky things? And is that enabled by default in modern C++ today? No, but it should be. I'm proposing that for C++ 29. Uh the simpler versions of that should have been in in in uh C++ 26, but there are still a lot of people even in the C++ standards committee that are very devoted to uh their old code and their old ways of doing things. Um there's people who says you should only standardize what is common in industry. But when the bugs are common in industry, you should do something else.
Is this going to be Zig's answers to real issues that people have in the real world? I'd argue that's not good enough for a modern systems programming language.
> We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. Abuse of assertions. Most of all, recklessly speeding past feature after feature with very little time taken for reflection and elimination of bugs and technical debt.
The vast majority of software is written by businesses, who have to cater to the lowest common denominator in their code base, including slop programmers, pre or post llm. They are not incentivized to go slower. We will never see a mass adoption of Tiger Style programming (though I would be happy to be proven wrong). That is the reality of what we need programming languages to help with in 2026. I've never met a professional programmer that has not seen or said the same thing about a code base that they've worked on.
New programming languages need to contend with that reality if they want to be adopted en masse. If not they are doomed to not be adopted (which is okay I've created many programming languages that are just for me). But if a programming language in never adopted then the supposed benefits or improvements of the language never trickle down to us the users of the software, so they just remain interesting ideas (which again is okay).
> This attention could have been harnessed in a few different ways. For example, he could have easily achieved a solid living via crowdfunding, even for San Francisco standards.
Andrew kelley runs a tight ship, and his foundation does not need a lot of money to keep going, but he has talked about how working on all the organizational transparency is not his favorite part of the project, and I can see why a lot of young programmers wouldn’t want to go that way.
Now let me be clear I actually like Zig, and have promoted it on Hacker News before, and written some code myself. I actual uses Zigcc in one of my projects because it makes my life easier. I genuinely love the tooling of Zig, and I feel like the language respects my time. I want the language to succeed
I also think that Andrew Kelley is a principled man with good engineering sense, and has turned down opportunities that would have made him a lot more money, were he to violate his own principles. That is admirable, and he has demonstrated it on so many occasions that it is currently not a question to me. What I would like to see, and what Andrew has said Zig focuses is how Zig can improve program correctness even more, without requiring me, or my coworkers to be a 10x programmer
I agree with some of your points, but I think the Safe C++ project will be difficult because it would require breaking backward compatibility with existing projects. Honestly, I also don't agree with the claim that 'if you manage it well, data races and memory safety errors won't happen.' However, C++ already has so many projects built on it that breaking backward compatibility would cause serious problems. I think it might be better to just switch to a different language altogether.
I notice something more interesting. This post shows Andrew to not only personally criticise Ben but also clearly shows an ideological stance against AI. I can see it from multiple angles - refusing AI PR's, refusing Anthropic's donation and multiple other things.
Either this ideology helps Zig position itself as a hand crafted language. Or this ideology is self defeating.
This is quite an interesting read from Andrew's perspective. But one line tells me everything I needed to know.
> The blog post is expertly written. It's almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article.
Even Andrew knew that this was going to be Anthropic's marketing opportunity for AI to rewrite Bun from Zig into Rust. This post from Jarred says it all. [0] If you have access to hundreds of billions worth of resources (infinite tokens and compute), they don't care what others think and some relationships are just cheap to discard.
Like I said before in [1] and [2], Bun (now Anthropic) does not care about you. They did this to market the capabilities of their AI models and this rewrite was an example of that in broad daylight. Even if Zig allowed AI generated contributions, this move was going to happen anyway.
I cannot believe that many commenters in [0] at the time did not see that this rewrite was eventually going to happen.
I have learned so much reading Andrew’s code and as I said in the original post: Bun would never have happened without Zig.
> The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.
Fuzzilli integration: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/24826
Merged PRs fixing issues Fuzzilli found in Bun’s Zig code:
- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/28926
- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/28934
- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29255
- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29210
- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29199
Searching “Fuzzilli” shows more PRs: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aoven-sh%2Fbun+is%3Apr+Fuz...
This is unprofessional and embarrassing for Zig.
I know very little about Jared but his article yesterday, which I read, seemed appreciative of Zig. I now learn he's donated significant chunks of money to them.
This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product.
It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig when it really just makes them look childish. Or maybe he doesn't care, and just wants to attack Jarred?
It's kind of strange to not engage with any of the points made in the article. Unlike you, I don't think the post makes them look childish at all. I think it raises a lot of valid points and makes me want to use Zig more.
Do you have bias? I'm not saying I don't have some hidden bias but I have no skin in the game. I don't use Bun or Zig or plan to.
My reflection comes after reading Jarred's post yesterday, which I found interesting, and then Andrew's today.
I just pasted this article into an LLM to understand the tone and the summary is:
> The overall tone is deeply personal, cathartic, biting, and polemical, with flashes of humor and a deliberate attempt to soften the ending.
Did you have a hard time picking that up from the article itself? I don’t see the point of asking an LLM to tell you what to feel about the article.
I'm rather critical of spamming humans with low effort LLM writing as well, but getting a neutral opinion about a text seems like a decent use tbh - for lack of alternatives because you'd hardly ask a human to do it.
Conventions are still being made, and I think this use might end up being acceptable.
How is pasting an article into an LLM going to get you a neutral opinion? It'll be at best an 'opinion' that aligns towards the fine tune dataset used by the org that made the LLM. I'd rather people own their own bias and bring something into the conversation rather than act as a mouthpiece for a statistical median.
I'm glad that you asserted that you do have potential hidden bias and say that you used an LLM to judge the tone of an article partly pertaining to AI usage in coding right after.
Let me check real quick with ChatGPT if you are being sarcastic or not.
Edit: Ah, my brain's been fried by comments that say this unironically and I read this as sincere, thanks commenter below, and apologies commenter above.
They are saying that someone who will summarize an article with AI is already implicitly biased. It's not about the AI, it's about the user.
I think I have some bias. I like rust. I like using opus, I don't want to use zig, don't see the point for it, but I find it aesthetically pleasing. I don't use JavaScript I wish it would disappear. If I did ise JavaScript I wouldn't run it on bun. Some of those tilt me either way. I agree with the LLMs take on the tone. The result of the two posts is that I think Jarred is a poopyhead, andrew is a bit childish but genuine and I'd probably like him, and I still won't use zig or bun or JavaScript. I plan to keep using rust and opus.
Please, I'm begging you, and the people that scan across this comment: Finishing mastering reading comprehension; It will help you for the rest of your life.
I'm not snarking, this is a problem affecting 30% or more of the population here in the states, and it's getting worse because of tools like AI. I'm not judging you, I don't think you are bad or deficient people, but this externalsing of comprehension and trust is self-harm.
Worse, it will lead you astray in ways that you won't tie back to this core problem.
To use an LLM safely you must have the discernment to understand when it has fallen into sycophancy, folly, or madness.
Uhm, I'm very confused by the last part of your comment. You put it into an LLM to...understand the tone? Is that supposed to convince me of something?
They phrased it poorly, but from context it seems clear they intend the LLM as a less biased third-party measure of the tone which agrees with their own assessment.
which they very much are not
Less biased? Maybe on political questions, etc, but this is a classic NLP task and I expect LLMs to be very reliable here
Very weird indeed. People must not realize that you can completely change the response you get back from an LLM by how you ask questions. Any bias can implicitly be implanted in the question you ask and drastically modify the response. This is what I got Gemini to say about the article:
very different from "The overall tone is deeply personal, cathartic, biting, and polemical, with flashes of humor and a deliberate attempt to soften the ending."Personally I don't think that matters, because the article is problematic enough when it can be read like ad hominem. Assuming that the question was phrased reasonably neutrally (but not necessarily free of hidden biases), the fact that LLM concluded so is an enough evidence here. Also as a non-LLM data point, I felt roughly same (especially the "softening" bit).
this is what worries me. I have friends that love what AI tells them about their personal pet 'thing' and how awesome it is. Yet not one of them has even tried once to get the AI to criticise it's own answers, and hence learn that you can trivially get an AI to make a convincing-_sounding case for any point of view.
I tell them to try, and they laugh at me as they roll their eyes and waffle on about 'tricking' the AI like its some kind of hacking.
Reality check. The confirmation that the author is not alone in having this particular feeling by using an LLM as a proxy.
Using an LLM as a proxy for an 'unbiased' source of personal confirmation bias is perhaps the most common 'use-case' for an LLM.
I guess they use an LLM to work out the tone of prose they read. These are strange times.
FWIW I was really interested in Zig and now I see that its lead developer is thin-skinned and bitter and has confused minimal criticism of his project with an attack on his person.
This is such a bad look and it's also flatly self-contradictory. He spends time in his conclusion asserting he doesn't have any personal criticisms of Jarred but he's fully happy to claim, reframe and repeat everyone else's, even criticisms he evidently heard in private.
You can also see that it was incompletely rewritten from a pure, personalised and personally-directed rant: "I noticed that you…" does not belong with the rest of the text.
Whatever the merits of Claude-driven rewrites (I suspect few, long-term), the article he is responding to has little to none of the vituperative quality of his own.
I think if it needed a response, and I was this angry, I would have written this whole post as a draft, filed it away in Apple Notes, and then posted "I have, yes, seen the article on the Bun blog; you don't need to send me it anymore! I will respond to parts of it in the future as and when they are particularly relevant."
Writing the response post can be valuable as emotional release or exploration. Posting it in this sprawling, mean form was dumb.
This entire thread puts me out on devs. I stuns me that there are this many people who either excuse or cheer on being hateful. Wanting to use a project becaues the author was this rude....what?
Just a complete lack of emotional intelligence. You do not treat people like this.
> It's kind of strange to not engage with any of the points made in the article. Unlike you, I don't think the post makes them look childish at all. I think it raises a lot of valid points and makes me want to use Zig more.
I know nothing about the drama here other than what's in the blog post, but these feel more like unnecessarily public personal attacks which don't really reflect well:
- a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective
- already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
- their vague "sell some cloud something" business plan was a farce
> I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred.
was the cherry on top.
Those are not personal criticisms, those are all professional criticisms. There are many people who don't seem to know the different between work and life and so they may conflate the two, but to me it's pretty obvious.
How is it unprofessional when it is simply someone giving their honest personal opinion on an issue that involves something that is valuable to them, on their personal blog nonetheless.
Is everyone a walking and talking brand now so that they have to always filter their words, walk on eggshells, hide behind corpo-speak so as to seem 'professional'?
More honest discourse is required in today's world, not less. It seems interactions online are becoming less and less authentic.
Yes, “corpo-speak” is the language of professionalism.
[delayed]
Nah, corpo-speak is the original slop. The result of too many comms/legal inputs to a conversation.
Professional communication is direct, clear, and ideally courteous (but only to a point).
Calling someone’s code “slop” surely isn’t professional nor courteous.
Nor is polemic against financiers.
Well, I can't think of other people more qualified to know when a Zig code is slop.
> Those people talked to each other. Everybody talked to everybody. The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.
There’s a big gap between corpo speak and “stinky manager”. That’s nowhere close to professional writing. And he’s not giving us his personal opinion, Kelley is telling us the conclusion of the “grape vine” - he’s reporting on rumors and gossip, and agreeing with it.
Why does this person owe you "professional writing" on their personal blog?
He's not operating personally as the leader of a major project.
> He's not operating personally as the leader of a major project.
What? So let me get this straight--if my open source project which I have given away for free becomes "major" (for some definition) then all of a sudden I have to filter my writing through some kind of average acceptableness test? Come on. [edit] It would be one thing if this was published on Zig letterhead, but it was the guy's personal blog...
You have to if you give a shit about the community you are leading, yes. You're not operating as a private figure in that role, everything you do affects the community and it is blind or selfish to act otherwise.
This is so deeply wrong. This person owes you nothing. You're accusing them of "selfishness" after they've given away thousands of hours of their time... Your entitlement is just breathtaking. Please find a way to improve yourself, the situation is dire.
Treat it as a data point and make your own decisions (he does back it up with several sources that indicate a workaholic mentality with that expectation for others). Hiding it ends up perpetuating the behavior unseen.
*Below is an aside that explains why I think it's better to air these things even if it seems like "rumors and gossip."
I know first hand how toxic some people are irl compared to their public persona. There was a professor in my department during my PhD who was known to be a slave driver, but there are no accounts of it outside of the department. We would have to warn incoming students about working with her, though sometimes they wouldn't believe it could be as bad as we said. I spoke with one of her students after she left the lab due to being hospitalized for exhaustion from overwork: the professor contacted her while she was still hospitalized and asked her to complete a task ffs!
> This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product
The article seems to be happy about the switch to Rust, that point is re-iterated multiple times in the article, and seemingly they were both awaiting Bun moving away from Zig and wishing for it.
seems to be is right.
The subtext, rather, is not happy at all.
I feel the same way as you do. Honestly, even though it was well-packaged, I did find it a bit rude. But since I don't know their personal relationship, it's not really my place to interfere.
The people who steal with AI and give no credit to the actual creative forces (that they are stamping out) are the fucking rude ones.
I just return to them the kindness they show me when they say, "You made this?? I made this!!"
I understand your anger too. AI did steal open source knowledge, and I agree with that part.
But separately from that, I think it's a bit unfair to talk about the people associated with it in such a dismissive way.
In reality, humans aren't purely rational beings, and I can understand why the Zig philosophy and the Bun manager who joined the AI side might not have looked good from that perspective. But I think that's a separate issue from the emotions involved.
It's not just in the past, and my anger isn't just about what was taken, but the community-destroying use it is being put to: Andrew's job isn't to make a JS runtime, it's to sell the idea that coding is dead.
When he made it his job to sell that narrative, he declared war on me. It should not surprise him or anyone else that I am going to take the war right back to his doorstep.
There are some points I understand rationally but find hard to agree with emotionally.
What I understand rationally is the claim that AI is destroying your garden and community. It's an undeniable fact that intellectual property and the associated disruption are happening. That's simply true.
But what I find hard to agree with emotionally is that personal attacks aren't always justified just because of that. I've also been affected by AI. I had to create a new homepage because the traffic to my technical blog dropped due to AI. Of course, there are also benefits. As a non-native English speaker, it opened up a new path for me to access good programming resources, which I couldn't easily get before. So I have both affection and resentment.
Still, I understand your feelings. Because for you, the emotional anger of having something you built destroyed without any compensation is real. Our situations are different.
That said, I don't think that necessarily justifies attacking individuals.
People often think of blogs and homepages as places to write 'personal stories.' But once they're made public, they carry responsibility. And Andrew Kelly is a public figure—his words spread easily. So there needs to be a certain level of responsibility when writing.
In any case, I respect your perspective
Again just to make the nuance clear: nothing I've built has been destroyed. What makes me red hot angry is the message that there's nothing left to build -- that the world will soon belong to the people who just mindlessly copy (Jarred and his ilk). They have been quite crystal clear in their message to me: not using AI makes me worthless garbage to be taken to curb, a snack for anyone using AI.
You see how many times people can tell YOU that you are worthless garbage before you start thinking, "I'm going to punch back at the people who punch me." 20? 50? 100 times you get punched in the face before you start to consider self-defense? Cause I've read that piss-poor message 50 times: "you will be replaced."
That's just them being cruel, not your fault.
Your skills and knowledge aren't your entire worth. I think you're a perfectly fine person. They just said cruel things that hurt you. Don't let that define you.
I actually think if people become mindless AI imitators, creative people like you will become even more competitive. Of course, I think you can still be creative even while using AI, but the kind of creativity we're talking about is just different.
Why bother fighting them? They're just people who are anxious themselves. I don't think you need to waste your energy defending yourself over such a pointless issue.
The claim that you're useless trash just because you don't use AI is wrong. AI is just one kind of workflow. You and they just didn't click.
As for people calling me useless trash, well, I hear that all the time. It's part of the freelancer life. But even so, that's just their opinion. I don't think of myself that way.
It's just that our environment makes things painfully difficult for us, my friend.
I'm sorry you had to go through those cruel messages. But I don't think they define you. You're a perfectly capable person, capable of intelligent conversation. You just chose not to adopt one particular workflow. That's not your problem.
If we keep talking, we might just end up hurting each other's feelings, so let's stop here and take a deep breath. Have a good day
> AI did steal open source knowledge
It's really sad to see my fellow FOSS enthusiasts adopt this very strange vocabulary from the anti-pirate people. No, no one has stolen anything, the knowledge is still out there. No, you cannot even "shameless copy" from something that is asking the world to copy from it. Literally the point for me and others is that what we put out can be used by anyone for anything, that's why we use FOSS licenses in the first place.
Fine, they're leeches. My problem is that if everyone behaved as selfishly as they do, there would be no more nice things for anyone.
> Fine, they're leeches.
But of the points is that no-one owes anyone anything, if you use my code I don't owe you support or anything else and by you using it, you owe me nothing either, no money, effort or anything else. Sure, if the maintainer want, it's nice when people fix the issues for the maintainer, as long as they want it, or that people and companies donate when maintainer set that up, but in no way should that be an expectation just because the creator slapped a FOSS license on what they made public. Don't want people to (mis)use, criticize, mangle, transform or copy what you've created? Don't use those licenses then.
This whole "no warranties" and its related intentions goes both ways, intentionally.
I just think you're fighting a losing battle. I'm pretty apathetic about it because I've never wanted to do anything but give away my stuff anyway. It only has value in my/your head most of the time.
I think how deeply you care about this and the way you castigate other people is unhealthy and it is critical for your own well-being that you come to terms with it.
in what way were they team members?
fixed it.
"An unprofessional embarrassment" is exactly how I feel about Bun.
I don't get mad at people for standing up for their morals, I get mad when they have none. AI is an a-moral tech, and Bun is using it in an a-moral way: for team Bun the ends justify any means.
I'm on team Zig!
No, it's embarrassing being obsessed with good tone to the point that people behaving badly should never be called out for it.
The article provides good background into how it got to this point - and it fits well with doing an opportunistic AI rewrite after being acquired by an AI provider.
It is not about good tone it's about not being hateful and rude. Why is this that hard to pick apart?
Why do devs believe being rude is somehow a sign of honesty? They are orthogonal. This post needed none of the mean-spirited attacks that it contained to make its points. It is only hurt by the attacks as seen by the focus on "tone" throughout these comments.
Agreed. This article should have stuck to the cold facts, rather than a series of personal criticisms that you wouldn’t see written out in the workplace.
Sadly there are far too many open source developers out there who are far too comfortable writing like this. It’s one reason I have stopped being active in open source. You would be fired (or at least disciplined) from any reasonable workplace if you acted like this.
> It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig when it really just makes them look childish.
Antirez made a post equivalent to: you'd be a fool not to use AI to increase test coverage.
Zig on the other hand has embarrassingly low test coverage given its adoption and time in development.
Their stance on AI is completely childish. They could benefit massively from it, yet refuse to even consider any potential usage.
It's one thing to try to stop PR spam. It's another thing to tie your hands behind your back and not even use it internally for the lowest hanging fruit where it could have major benefits.
They could use AI to triage potential real bugs from PR spam... but instead they just let real bugs go unnoticed for longer than need be because they won't even use AI to help triage...
Childish or no, anti-AI sentiment is ubiquitous and growing.
From a PR perspective there’s a lot to gain in the short term by picking the “anti-AI” lane. And you can always change your mind later.
Surveys show that 60% of US adults don't like it which means 40% either don't care or do. I'd advise not getting your ideas about sentiment towards it from places like HN which are very biased and unrepresentative places of anything.
I find the anti crowd increasingly to be hateful and close-minded and it is disappointing because I have a lot of friends in it. There's a moral puritanism which gives people feelings that they are on the "right" side and thus any level of rudeness or hatred is justified and it only hurts their SIDE.
It's ubiquitous among dinosaurs. Don't worry. They will be left behind.
Bahahaha no, your little of time of delusion is coming to an end. Real engineers are coming back.
Real engineers don’t eschew powerful engineering tools because of what their political tribe says about them.
in what way is it chidlish to have a principled position like this? you may disagree, i def use llms. but andrew has clear reasons for why he doesnt.
I am fine with people having principles and doing things their way. Not everything has to be a race to be the best. There are still plenty of people that appreciate traditional crafts. Anyway, if Zig+AI can be the next, greatest thing, can't someone just fork it and make it happen?
People are doing the simpler thing: moving ecosystems more suppotive of their goal.
> Zig on the other hand has embarrassingly low test coverage
And? Why would low test coverage matter. It’s not an indication of project quality nor does a high coverage mean an absence of bugs or errors.
I almost completely disagree.
Unprofessional? Maybe a little, but honest, and while the truth isn't flattering to Jarred, I'd say generally kind.
Embarrassing? Not from my seat. Andrew is just revealing the relationship dynamics between a principled programming language developers and pragmatic business users of that language.
I had already inferred a bunch that this post confirms based on the agentic port from forked-Zig to Rust. It's very nice to have suspicions confirmed.
How can you say that a post which has the criticisms it does is kind?
> It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig
I'm not sure that's his aim here. I imagine he has been asked dozens of times what he thinks about the switch, what it means for Zig, etc. etc. and wanted to just address it one time, which is understandable.
The tone is... strong. I think repeating grapevine rumours about Jarred's management skills adds very little and probably could have been removed. But at its heart I see this post as example of a common clash: open source code hackers vs Silicon Valley "growth hackers".
Kelley is disappointed that a promising Zig project took VC money and went from his passion project's prime example to one that shit talked it on the way out. I get why he's emotional. I wouldn't have written it the way he did but I also don't think policing tone is beneficial for honest communication.
I don't think it's too bad, but I also don't think it's good.
I also don't think Andrew can claim at the end "I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred" when the post includes the sentence "Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs".
It accuses him of presiding over “a shitshow”, and basically seems to imply he’s a greedy narcissist.
So, yes, I find that line laughably disingenuous.
[delayed]
Before the post I didn't know what zig and bun is. I needed a llm to explain it to me. Now I think about trying Zig. So, no, I don't think it's childish. It reads like a engineer that knows which kind of people you don't need in your environment. I can feel every word he wrote because I know this situations.
Totally agree. This article really turned me off of ever using Zig for a project.
I think he also wants to attack Anthropic by proxy.
how is it attacking him for using a different product? except for compile times nothing here even indicates that rust would be a bad choice for bun
> This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product.
Well, TFA has a conveniently titled section "Addressing the Blog Post", that raised (setting aside speculation) some good points:
I agree and I’m confused that some other commenters aren’t seeing it. Some of these lines are what I’d expect from an edgy teen lashing out in a private Discord venting session, not an adult making a public post on a highly visible tech topic:
> The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.
This isn’t about wanting “sanitized corpo-speak” or something, but I do expect leads of projects to behave like adults and not build arguments on ad-hominem attacks and rumors they supposedly heard.
Address the topic and put forth some arguments. I don’t care to hear your personal beef with someone aired publicly.
> Two, I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred
That’s quite a statement to make at the end of a post that seems to contain little else…all just thinly veiled.
Saying someone has „beginner energy“ but reframing it as a faux positive (this person fails and thus learns)
Or saying the grapevine says someone is a „stinky manager“? Basically I’m not saying this person is bad it’s just that I need to bring up on this blog that everyone agrees this person is bad.
All seems to be in very poor taste even if true…
I'm quite confused by this. Is calling someone a "stinky manager" a personal attack? It's funny that we can't differentiate the person from his "job". I work with some shitty managers, but I don't hold it against them on a personal level...
Don’t think there is a clear line to draw as to where the person stops and the professional performance starts when it comes to management because on soft skill it is inherently driven by personal attributes. It’s a bit like a good salesman exudes likeability - it’s integral to the performance of the job and part of the person.
He may well be a shit manager. I have no idea. Either way it’s not something you casually throw out there in a blog like this
> "Oven is going to be a grind, especially the first nine months or so. If work-life balance means a lot of time spent not working, it's probably not a good fit."
Stinky manager is charitable.
You do your job for hours every week, it is undoubtedly part of you. Calling somebody that is very personal and rude. I'm shocked that there are this many people who don't find issue with it. It removes any kindness from the post and turns it all up to 11. I's deeply personal.
Do some of you really talk to others like this and find no issue with it? It's hard to say words like that and not end up with deep schisms and hatred.
Are you serious? If I told you to your face "you are shitty at your job" you don't see that as a personal attack?
It’s an inconsistent statement to make when the rest of the article contains ad hominem attacks like these:
> The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.
This is a weirdly childish post. I enjoy a good post where someone speaks their mind without running it through the corporate speak filter first, but it also gives you insights into how a person thinks and operates. With good leadership you can strip away the corporate filter and the result is still professional, but this article reveals something much less than professional
> So, when the Anthropic aquisition finally happened, we at ZSF breathed a sigh of relief. When the donation silently stopped, our bank account was ready for it. When they neither canceled their monthly meeting with us, nor showed up, we were not surprised. The relationship was over.
Seen this time and time again, project/organization gets taken over, and everything "good" they did doesn't get exited with fanfare or anything, just silently dropped as your benefactor starts silently ignoring you.
I'm really happy they saw the writing on the all and were prepared for the inevitable, a really great lesson you shouldn't need to learn yourself the hard way, and FOSS project relying on one/two big donators should take heed, we'll see a lot more of this in the developer tooling ecosystem moving forward for sure.
I found this post very refreshing! I’m sure it would have been very tempting to one-up the “PR-speak” of the Bun post. Likewise, it would have been very tempting to include the same set of facts that reflect negatively on Jarred, while studiously concealing one’s own opinion (eg “I heard people called him a stinky manager. I am not saying that, other people are, but I’m not”). I appreciated that it was just … genuine.
It’s just one long ad hominem
I don't think you are using that right. Saying someone is bringing a bad vibe to your project, as the point he has a bad vibe is just stating the conclusion.
Like if someone calls you a bad programmer and doesn't hire you as a programmer, isn't ad hominem
No, the discussion started with a the article from Bun, stating that rust has some technical advantages for them. The response from the Zig creator is a bunch of personal attacks directed at one guy, like calling him a stinky manager. All of these are fully unrelated to which language is better for Bun.
This is like the textbook definition of an ad hominem.
Ad Hominem is only a fallacy when the speaker's personal qualities are irrelevant to the topic at hand. When one man has unilateral control over a project, you have to consider it as an extension of their personality.
To be pedantic the ad hominem fallacy is about trying to deny an argument by attacking the author, so in a discussion about zig Vs rust if Andrew isn't trying to enter the discussion and just argue "that guy was stinky, glad he is gone" is not really an ad hominem, just not classy let's say.
> if Andrew isn't trying to enter the discussion
But he is. Both in the title, and in later half of the blog post, he directly enters that discussion. I'm not saying an ad hominem argument is always bad, but this clearly is one.
Right I think the correct term is “character assassination”. It starts by calling him a novice, goes on to call him a “stinky manager”, and then lands the deepest cut possible in this profession: his code sucks. At least Kelley thanked him for his money.
This is not refreshing, I usually expect better from Kelley. The best move would have been to say nothing at all except “best of luck, Zig will miss him but”. Now all Ziglings must wonder if they’re going to receive a hit piece from the Zig founder if they cross him.
Do you think that all ziglings refuse to write idiomatic code, have public fights with the language maintainers, and then write giant blog posts about how they're ditching the language because it just isn't good enough?
It isn't. The grapevine stuff was unnecessary and should have been cut out but there is plenty of concrete stuff in there as well.
Part of it might feel like ad hominem, but I think the bluntness is justified in this case. It provides some pretty important context on the situation.
As an outside observer who knew little about Zig and Bun, the impression I got is that the rewrite came out of nowhere, and that the Zig community was surprised by it. The post makes it quite clear that this wasn't the case, and describes how the actions and overall mentality of Bun's creator already suggested such a thing was likely to happen, straight from the mouth of someone who worked with him and isn't afraid to voice his thoughts. Not everything needs to be PR speak.
You can be blunt without being hateful or an asshole. It's not about PR, it's about treating other people as human beings.
Agreed. This blog post strikes the balance between PR-speak and x.com
There are astute comments about the post's tone elsewhere in this thread[0]
But this killed my hopes for Zig.
The drama is fun, and Andrew is maybe even admirable in his earnest, but this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project. I know that's boring and uninspired, but that's what I want my tech stack and it's management to be.
Also, maybe Jarred was a net negative, but bun was also a really big project using Zig, and the project leaving isn't as good for Zig as Andrew is making it seem. It genuinely seems he's putting a lot of priority on purity and ideology over just growth of the language. And I am sorry, but adoption and reaching critical mass is an important part of a serious programming language.
[0] esp. nilirl.
> this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project
I don't immediately see how much the seriousness of the project is related to the language the author chose in their personal blog post. It's similar to saying that Linux could not have become a serious project because of the way Linus communicated in his emails.
Yes, jerks love to use Linus’ success to justify being jerks.
Not sure where I justified anything. I just said that it's not related. You can be a jerk or not, and your project can be successful or not.
> and the project leaving isn't as good for Zig as Andrew is making it seem
In this case, Bun was acquired by Anthropic. Leaving Zig is not necessarily out of merit. As much as they pretend it was.
He is understandably annoyed. It feels like you are making it a problem for people to have emotions and give signs that they have those emotions. He didn’t even write anything direct and it is on his personal blog
In what way the article convinced you that Andrew Kelley is not professional enough for a serious project like Zig? Isn't his contribution to the language what's important?
He's leading the community. Not having basic professional does indeed kill them vibe for some of us. When is he going to pile on somebody else he disagrees with?
Zig's community is - bar none - the least toxic programming community I've experienced. People on this website (who have never witnessed a single Zig community interaction) love to read blogposts from afar and come to conclusions this way and that, but if they ever stopped to actually engage with the people involved they'd find out the truth quite easily.
> this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project
I actually think this gets to, but steps over, the core objection: traditional "hacker" mindset vs VC "growth hacking" mindset.
> And I am sorry, but adoption and reaching critical mass is an important part of a serious programming language.
Why? Why can't he create a language with exactly the kind of purity and ideology he wants, broader adoption be damned? Why must everything optimize for user growth and mindshare?
> And I am sorry, but adoption and reaching critical mass is an important part of a serious programming language.
Would you argue that Chez Scheme (to pick a random example) isn't a "serious programming language"? And I am sorry, but the assumption that "explosive growth" in the venture capital sense is somehow necessary for "success" is cancer.
> but this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project.
Yes, I think you are totally right. I'm sure Linux would never be so big as it is without a maintainer that talks so professional than Linus Torvalds.
Not sure a personal attack against Jarred really helps the case for using Zig. He could have and should have focused on the language and not “a stinky manager”. Honestly, this makes me want to steer clear of Andrew as much as Jarred.
Its an attack an Jarred's public, (un)professional behaviour. One most of us in the community have born witness too in recent months.
"Jarred, in his professional capacity, drove away many from our community, and we'd prefer to disassociate." is not 'Jarred is a bad person, privately'.
Now, in these circles, that might as well be the same thing, given how little personal life I imagine most VCs have left outside of work. But that's not really Andrew's problem.
I won't defend Andrew's style; I think he could mask some his neurodivergence more when communicating to a wider neurotypical audience. But it's his project, his community is certainly aware, and this too, is a known quantity.
It might help you though, to reread the piece with the assumption that Andrew is being completely sincere, without adding in a secondary subtext like, "Andrew is trying to assassinate Jarred's character".
I think he’s being completely sincere in this attempt to assassinate this person’s character. I say this as someone who before this day regarded Kelley as a role model. Now I see him in the same category as a Musk like character. Don’t blame “unmasked neurodivergence” for this, plenty of neurodivergent people can communicate effectively and professionally to a wide audience without attacking someone’s professional character.
For example, given the number of claims made here there’s very little actual evidence and support. Kelley says Jared is a bad manager and credits rumors. He says he writes slop code and doesn’t provide a single example or prove that statement. If this were his “neurodivergence” coming through I’d expect more thorough argument and less “stinky manager” grade school insults.
Andrew's online social behavior is largely a streak of pettiness imo. This is not even close to the first time I've seen him write something I felt was overtly mean spirited, not just euphemistically "blunt".
"Was silence not an option?"
i watched a youtube video where he called out people as garbage programmers... i felt that was petty, his streak continues i guess
Could you please link the YouTube video? I tried to search but couldn't find one with "garbage programmers".
Given the chronology set out by Andrew, I think it's warranted anyway.
Makes me want to give him a handshake and a big hug
It's hard, in my opinion, to lend credence to the author here when they decided to devote the first and largest section of their article to an incisive display of speculative ad hominem.
Would have been a great opportunity to outline the benefits of Zig! I've been keen to pick Zig up recently due to mitchellh's evangelism and inspiring writing on the subject.
This article puts me off learning Zig.
> first and largest section of their article to an incisive display of speculative ad hominem.
Seems you're not alone in feeling this, mind quoting the exact and verbatim parts that seem like "speculative ad hominem"? I see there are quite a bits about how Andrew sees Jarred and his workflow/work mentality, but I'm not sure I see clearly what is supposed to be the ad hominem, speculative or not.
Sure:
> he was essentially groomed from a young age
> It's one thing to choose a poor work-life balance for oneself; a different thing entirely to demand it of others
> Jarred was a stinky manager
The second thing is not an ad hominem, it's talking about what he did or how he did it, not who he is.
Casting aspersions without proof, even if it's something everyone knows, is in poor taste and ad hominem. I've never heard a bad word about Jaredd before, so Andrew seems more like a stinky person to me right now.
There's a direct quote in the article from Jaredd talking about poor work/life balance
The author being the author of zig…
> Would have been a great opportunity to outline the benefits of Zig!
Eh, Google and ChatGPT both exist?
> I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred
The whole post felt like a personal criticism of Jarred.
I'd consider the opinions professional criticisms of Jarred. While focused on him individually I don't think they are very personal
Personal and professional are not mutually exclusive.
If I criticize your code, that is a professional criticism.
If I criticize your code and say it reflects your consistent carelessness and stupidity, it is also personal.
If I say you fabricated something, then that is a personal criticism, it alleges an ethical violation. In a professional context, it's also a professional criticism (every profession has some ethical standards).
> We probably tried to tell you to try enabling it and you didn't listen. We have good advice, damn it!
Not knowing whether you actually gave the advice you're blaming them for not taking isn't professional, it instead comes across as bitter.
i think they are extremely personal and actually very distinct from professional criticisms.
Can you criticize a project which is mainly contributed and managed by one person without criticizing the same person who does the decisions that cause criticisms?
Yes, I think very easily and I have read examples of this. There are bits of this in the article, but the main thrust attempt to portray Jarred as a greedy asshole enamored with Thiel/VC thought is not about the project and quite clear reading the article. It’s entirely tactless and bitter imo
> main thrust attempt to portray Jarred as a greedy asshole enamored with Thiel/VC thought
What made you get that takeaway from the article? I didn't get that feeling at all, mainly seems to be something like "Jarred does some good and some bad, personally I don't agree, still wish him well", but clearly some specific part in the article must have given you this impression, if so what part?
The "some good" part reads like it exists as a buffer between other parts which don't sound objective, but rather defensive and personally angry. > Fun fact: people talk to each other. The intention here seems to indicate that Jared could've never known that could happen. It doesn't sound like professional feedback and more how you talk to someone during after a road rage incident.
And the fact that immediately after no "personal criticism" he proceeds to call his behavior "fantasy fever dream." Sometimes presentation matters as much as factuality.
The lack of sources and citation for a pretty one-sided claim doesn't help either.
> jumping head first into problems that he was not yet equipped to solve, leading to mediocre outcomes in terms of engineering
> having graduated from the Thiel Fellowship school of thought rather than university, he was essentially groomed from a young age into uncritically embracing the Silicon Valley mindset,
> this "beginner energy" started to hit differently for me. It's one thing to choose a poor work-life balance for oneself; a different thing entirely to demand it of others
> Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience
> gets to live out his productivity fantasy fever dream, he's probably already super wealthy. He has minor tech celebrity status.
Frankly, I have trouble seeing how a neutral reader doesn’t see this as a clear personal attack. That the article ends with “I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred” is almost comical given the preceding paragraphs.
Even more comical when you realize he couldn't stop himself from immediately following "no personal criticisms of Jarred" with
> gets to live out his productivity fantasy fever dream, he's probably already super wealthy. He has minor tech celebrity status.
in the following paragraph.
And literally 3 sentences later he goes back to insulting him ("productivity fantasy fever dream"). Even if that is true, it's still an unwise post to publish in this form IMHO. If the goal was to defend Zig, that could've been done in a less personal manner.
I think he messed that part up and it comes off as passive aggressive but he is probably scared of the “outrage” from the angels of the internet about how rude he was to Jarred
I'm about to comment exactly this.
[flagged]
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.
I don't see anything business related in that statement.
What's this new level of gaslighting? "It was not because of me, but because of the business situation I was in". Wait... wasn't he in that "business situation" because of actions HE took?
“Jarred was a stinky manager”. Is this professional criticism?
It's called anecdote from people with direct and personal experience with Jarred
To me, this whole effort of rewriting Bun from Zig to Rust looks like a big marketing move. The question is: if Anthropic AI is really that powerful, why not just fix the bugs and give it the more ambitious task of redesigning the existing Bun Zig codebase in a way that eliminates not only the current bugs but also prevents similar ones from happening in the future?
The sole reason for that rewrite was Zig creator announcing he won't be accepting AI contributions. It hurt Anthropic's feelings.
Conversely we have actual evidence of Bun rewriting in Rust because Andrew wouldn't accept AI contributions, actually hurt Andrew's feelings.
Not really. It seems like the Rust rewrite blog post triggered this. Which, even though I don’t agree with the tone, seems to be valid criticism.
[citation needed]
Here[0] are other reasons besides AI
- [0] https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-s-zig-fork-got-4x-faster-compilatio...
I think that post highlights a difference in philosophical approach to software development. Bun is focused on moving fast and will deal with the consequences as they come. Zig takes a more planful approach.
I've experienced both in my career and I fall solidly on the planful side. It's why stopped using homebrew and I've avoided huggingface packages as much as possible.
Citation that this was the reason or citation that he said that?
For the latter: https://youtu.be/iqddnwKF8HQ?si=cvU8Fh3ah7ZCxg3M
From 26:38
But Rust is exactly the tooling that gives humans and LLMs a lot of those checks for free, and things like RAII.
If you use Rust the way it was designed to be used, rather than relying on countless "unsafe" blocks, you need to redesign the entire codebase architecture to make it compatible with the borrow checker rules.
The borrow checker really isn't that bad. It isn't like they were porting from something with GC. They were already having to think about these things anyway. Even then opus seems to have no difficulty going between c# and rust while respecting the idioms of both. No unsafe needed. Zig should be even easier except the lack of a training corpus for whatever frankenversion of zig that bun was using.
All that unsafe does in these cases is enable the "unsafe super-powers" which the compiler can't check, thus shifting the responsibility onto the author. But for example if you've got some code which doesn't borrow check, and you just sprinkle unsafe keywords on it, now you've got code which still doesn't borrow check and diagnostics telling that this unsafe keyword was futile and you should remove that.
I haven't reviewed this code, but the percentages described don't sound like they'd need a huge architectural overhaul to use much less unsafe, it might take more actual human effort than they want though.
Even if you “rely on countless unsafe blocks”, unsafe is additive, it gives access to additional APIs which are not checked. It does not disable affine types, the borrow checker, or send/sync traits. Unless the entire codebase is unsafe (e.g. fresh out of c2rust) it’s very hard to not have more guarantees.
And because unsafe is generally highly local or localizable reasoning (conventionally backed by safety justifications) it really is quite reasonable to go plugging at it, or task an AI within that.
For 99.99% of cases, you're reading and writing this under an operating system whose kernel is written in a language without send/sync, and inside a browser that also largely written in languages without send/sync, because those systems are fundamentally well designed. So instead of fixing the bugs and rethinking the architecture, the author of Bun decided to transpile almost the entire codebase from Zig to Rust without a deep architectural review. Okay...
Those systems you're alluding to received ungodly amounts of work and resources, vastly more than most projects can ever hope for, and yet they're still full of holes and security exploits. You're unwittingly making a great argument against using C, C++ – or Zig.
Those systems are primarily written in C or C++-but-in-C-style, right? Without exploiting RAII among other features, as Jarred mentioned that he liked in Rust. While Rust took RAII from C++.
What I mentioned is only a tiny part of the entire software, which has been successfully written in C, C++, and now in Zig as well, and is used daily by people around the world.
If you are writing in C-like codebase and aren't tracking lifetimes and ownership at least as well as a borrow checker you're opening yourself to CVEs.
I do wonder to what degree this weird play originated from Anthropic, versus from an overeager founder selling past the close.
I can imagine Anthropic wanting to acquire Bun without the gimmicks.
IMHO 'marketing' as a supposed incentive is too easily thrown around by people who probably don't know what marketing really is.
zig doesn't accept ai written code
How is Bun codebase connected to Zig codebase?
Rumor has it there is a HN submission on the frontpage right now about that very thing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843352
You can't do "redesigning the existing Zig code in a way that eliminates not only the current bugs but also prevents similar ones from happening in the future" without actually changing Zig itself.
Why?
"effort" is a big word to describe typing out a few prompts to create something with 5k+ open issues.
"Typing out a few prompts" does not match the process described in Jarred's article. https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust
Static guarantees are better than stochastic parrots. A static linger beats telling Claude "check this idiom". Etc etc.
[dead]
> The main problem, however, was code quality.
> The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it.
Perhaps the amount of bugs comes from using a C-like language that requires meticulous manual care to avoid writing runtime bugs.
Even C++ would be a safer choice because of RAII.
When you have to dedicate significant resources to avoid/fix runtime issues that are made impossible at compile time by other languages, the programmer isn't entirely at fault.
Memory safety problems are still possible in the new Rust Bun:
People bring this up a lot. What I see here is that thousands of potentially (not actually, just potentially) safety risks have been neatly tagged in the code.
If you took a program written in Zig, Go, C++, or C, you would have no idea which parts of the code were potentially unsafe. In those languages, the entire program is one big unsafe{} block.
Rust isolates unsafe code. Having them explicitly tagged means they're isolated and can be eradicated over time, if need be. Though in many cases, unsafe blocks are quite safe.
Yes - I think the proof of the pudding will be whether they put in the effort to eliminate these unsafe blocks. The conversion to Rust is the starting point that makes this possible, but it's definitely not "done" at this point.
> 78% of those blocks are a single line — a pointer that came from C++, or one call into a C library
Don't those blocks need some additional lines for error checking to prevent the unsafety from spreading to the safe code?
It depends
Suppose there's a C library libape which implements monkeys you need in your software. There's a C API where we pass a pointer to a valid monkey and a 32-bit unsigned integer which controls how delicious bananas are. Any 32-bit unsigned integer is valid here, except zero because monkeys always think bananas are at least somewhat delicious, and there's no return value.
Our Rust wrapper probably has Monkey as a type, wrapping one of those valid monkey pointers we mentioned, and so our wrapper for that API call is some unsafe code which just calls the C with this monkey pointer and a non-zero unsigned 32-bit integer which in Rust is just the type NonZeroU32 and we're done. That's a single line, the unsafety checking was all done in Rust's type system, every Monkey has a valid monkey pointer, every NonZeroU32 is (as its name suggests) a non-zero unsigned 32-bit integer.
Now on the other hand, maybe we're wrapping code which takes a char * pointer intended to point at some zero terminated ISO-8859-1 encoded text. That Rust wrapper would be responsible for this translation and maybe you do that work in the wrapper function. But, if you had sixty calls like that, probably you make a Rust type for this problem named like Iso8859dash1Text and then those unsafe calls don't have a lot of boilerplate because all that boilerplate (which is probably even safe Rust depending on how exactly you do it) lives in this Iso8859dash1Text type you made. And that's also a useful model if later you discover the C library lied and it's not ISO-8859-1 it's really Windows Codepage 1252 ...
Possible, yes. But it's not like it's terribly difficult to verify correct usage of "unsafe" that amounts to a basic function call to a C library. Trivial uses of unsafe are pretty innocuous.
Yes but through iterative ratcheting, some portion of that unsafe can likely be migrated to idiomatic code without unsafe. And the other 96% of the code now has more mechanical guarantees than it did before.
Static linting in Rust via clippy also makes it pretty straightforward to begin enforcing things like "unsafe blocks need to have safety doc comments" as a CI warning or failure, and there are community tools that focus on this topic too.
I can't stand the practice of "LLM porting" personally but if you're going to do a mechanical rewrite from something else into Rust, this (permit unsafe and unidiomatic but 1:1 translation at first) is a fairly reasonable strategy imo.
dude was writing slop before A.I. Andrew called him out.
I don't write Rust - but I sure know that I'm not supposed to use 'unsafe'.
You have to put similar amount of resources when writing in Rust as well. With the difference that it’s more front loaded. Personally I’m a fan of Rust’s approach but the price for having bug free code has to be paid, regardless, one way or the other.
C++ would also introduce a myriad other subtle safety problems that would require years of expertise to even notice.
I’ve not seen any languages that does not require meticulous care to avoid runtime bugs. Type checking and lifetime ownership eliminate some, but not all of them.
> Type checking and lifetime ownership eliminate some, but not all of them.
They actually remove certain classes completely. E.g. lifetime ownership in Rust removes all bugs related to the reason why it is in the code syntax (a.k.a. lifetime markers remove use-after-free completely in Rust.)
So less meticulous care then?
That "I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred" made me do a spit take, because a majority of what I had just read was absolutely a personally targeted criticism of Jarred.
Whether that's "okay" is a totally separate issue. I have no idea what the history here is, or whether this is warranted. But that was absolutely a personal criticism!
Despite stated otherwise in the post, this is a personal attack.
Anyway, let's try to discuss something more technical: I predict Zig will lose steam, and in 2027, will lose relevance:
1) It's hardcore Anti-AI 2) It's moved to Codeberg 3) It doesn't have the momentum to sustain the disadvantages of these two decisions
The project will in max 2 years make a blog post, not admitting to their mistakes, telling themselves that Zig is a success, despite the industry having moved on.
If you bothered to actually learn just a little bit about the Zig project, you'll know that they are doing ok. They never cared about introducing new features at a fast speed, having lots of contributors, or getting corporate sponsorship, if that's not already obvious from the article. In fact, they intentionally keep a distance from all of that to make the project more sustainable and less prone to the whims of corporations.
They don't have a goal of becoming a popular language, though and will continue to work on it as long as there are donations. They don't care about being mainstream and there are niche companies who appreciate Zig and donate.
To be honest, I'm also leaning this way, especially because of the hardcore anti-AI stance, so much that Zig will close security vulnerability issues on Codeberg if you mention that they were found with LLMs. I don't think that this is a good approach.
I also think Zig has a rough road ahead, but not because of AI or moving to codeberg. No, it's because Andrew isn't really a BDFL. He's at best a DFL. The project is already mostly closed off to external contributors.
It kind of reminds me of Elm in a way. Though I'm not expecting 6 years of drought just yet.
Could just as easily say the same thing about Bun.
If one can easily swap in the next new js engine du jour…
4) It's led by an emotionally unintelligent individual who will personally attack you for choosing alternative products.
wow this is the most professional comment I've ever seen in this thread.
Like Linus?
Linus attacked bad software, Andrew attacks the Thiel Fellowship, VC Foundings, and AI. There's little or no Linus there, pointing fingers at, and even when he does, he points at code he neither uses nor maintains. Linus don't give a shit about other people projects and businesses.
It's a conflict of core values, and you've demonstrated it here.
You have defined success (for a project, and possibly a person too) as solely 'relevance'.
Jarred would agree with you wholeheartedly, I imagine. Andrew would ask you to leave.
It's okay to have different values and part ways.
It's not wise, however, to project your personal values onto other people, and judge them on those fabricated merits. You'll end up frustrated and confused more often than not.
Judge their choice of values. Judge them on their alignment with their chosen values.
As an example, Andrew doesn't like Jarred's chosen 'Silicon Valley' values, but thinks that Jarred aligns himself well with those values. This feels as a personal attack to you who also holds those values. And on some level, a person intimating you core values suck couldn't be more personal.
what's the problem in moving to codeberg?
It's not where people are, it's not boosted by Google/$AI.
the loss of network effect.
Your prediction is extremely short sighted, and I can only guess it is because of your extreme pro-AI stance, as well as not being part of the open-source community.
Yes that's true, I'm biased because I am pro-AI.
What are your hopes and predictions for the Zig project?
Nothing against Pro AI but their stance on wanting to write code by hand is not bad either. AI does over complicate things and there's a lot of slop. For a systems programing language, AI doesn't sound like a right fit. I'm personally tempted to reduce the dependency on AI. IMO, after a while, the overall productivity plateaus.
I do hope they keep their stance and philosophy though it is not the easiest with a BDFL governance. I do not have predictions though, it seems silly to try and do so when it will be a random chance outcome
I was wrong to be upset this whole time that the rewrite would hurt Zig. This is one of those rare occasions when I’m glad I was wrong. Interesting insights.
I don't think Bun actually matters much, even for web development. For sure there is a lot of enthusiasm, but all the production systems I know continue to use Node.js and are not moving to Bun any time soon. In the "real world" not that many people care about it.
I agree with you, but Bun was still something of a flagship project for Zig. It received a lot of attention, which indirectly helped Zig's popularity.
I find this sad, as I use Bun as a Node.js replacement that works really well. I wanted improved builds times and run speed. Both things bun provided. It reduced ram usage and worked with the node ecosystem well.
So for some workflows it looked like a flat improvement on all parts.
Exactly, it's some niche thing not a lot of people care about in my opinion. I certainly don't.
A better title would be 'My emotions on the Bun Rust Rewrite', since the article feels like an emotional reaction rather than a thoughtful analysis of the situation. Give it some time..
I'm rooting for Zig either way, even though I have nothing against Rust and I don't directly use bun.
> You can imagine how we might want to put some social distance between ourselves and a project whose irresponsible software engineering practices invite the exact kind of criticism that people are eager to level.
The other (very salient) points notwithstanding, I'm afraid this quote shows that Zig hasn't learned a lesson that other languages of its generation (and older) have: if a project's memory safety depends only on "responsible engineering practices", then that project most likely won't be memory safe. Quoting the "swiss cheese" model used in risk management: one slice of cheese (engineering practices) just isn't enough if you want to be reasonably sure your program is memory safe.
I’m reminded of the hierarchy of controls in machine safety. If you can’t eliminate the hazard, or substitute a less hazardous thing, then engineering out the hazard (like Rust did) is preferable to a procedural control (“git gud at engineering”).
C/C++ with static code analysis is not worse than Rust. But most Rust developers are beginners during there are many C/C++ developers with 20+ years knowledge. So whats exactly is the point in using Rust?
Can you elaborate on the distinction between "eliminate the hazard" as the first choice and "engineering out the hazard" as a fallback approach?
In my safety background (recently aerospace, ARP4754/4761), removing and avoiding the hazard are essentially equivalent, with reducing the likelihood and mitigating its effects acceptable if you can't remove or avoid the hazard, and procedure is also the least preferred mechanism.
C/C++ does not care and they’re currently the language for foundational work (OS, platforms, and libraries). Python and Java does not care, they will just throw runtime exceptions and crash. Rust care, but they don’t play well with the rest of the world.
rust is currently making its way into linux kernel, core contributors even did rust conf talks...windows already has rust going into kernel and core libraries, osx is also adopting rust, its making its way into all those 'foundational works' you're talking about.. so i'm pretty confused what you are saying
How this should have gone:
"Dear Diary,
Today I didn't post a response to a blog post that levelled minimal criticisms at my project.
Below is the full text I didn't post."
articles like these are needed - if you've to call people out - do it.
the tech industry's fake politeness has caused pain and confusion.
& yeah - I had already stayed off Bun before the whole rewrite, but now more reasons.
I think people have read so much corporate PR posts they think that is a rule of how to post online.
This post is his personal blog, he is a human writing what he thinks.
If this was a tweet people would be fine with it, but it is a blog so he should make it corporate-y
"If this was a tweet people would be fine with it"
Actually, some folks do care about how the leader and public face of a project conduct themselves regardless of venue. If a different public figure ie some CEO wrote something reprehensible about some particular ethnic group, is it more excusable or forgivable if they did it on their personal social media account rather than the company blog? Same basic thing.
Public writing in a personal space is still public writing. Being held accountable for publicly stated views is an inherent part of sharing them in public, no?
Anyone who would write an article like this is much more distasteful to me than anything Jarred did.
Why? I think the original blog post, which he is replying to, demands a reply.
Its a breath of fresh air to get this whole debate out in the open
I do not think the original blog post demands a reply. Zig people have already written about this. I found the original blog post quite complimentary of Zig and the community.
It is challenging for me to imagine how one would think an article like this is net beneficial for the community rather than reacting with grace.
Jared’s post was entirely technical, this post was mostly personal.
Jared has behaved appallingly in recent months. Comments about locking out humans from open source code contributions and the gaslighting at the start of the migration are top of mind.
well, for me personally, "the" Zig project is not Bun but Ghostty, and it always has been.
yeah, Mitchell is very pro-AI, but he is thoughtful, and he sometimes highlights the difference between Zig's and Ghostty's approaches to LLMs (outright ban vs taming)
Yeah and Andrew Kelley is anti AI for his project because it’s counter to the projects learning goals. I think it’s perfectly fine for a project to determine if AI contributions are accepted. Maybe that means change is slower in that project, maybe that means things are more deliberate too.
OSS projects can survive not being on GitHub, Python was something like 20 years was not on gh. If the service has severe outages and there are alternatives why wouldn’t you move? Most people aren’t contributing to the runtime anyways, they are just using the language.
I have a working port of ghostty to rust ... not even kidding
Andrew could have been more tactful in his blog post (though as I've grown older I often find less tact to be more effective), but it really sounds like accommodating Bun was a net negative for Zig.
I wouldn't call it beginner energy, though I understand it might seem like that. Rather, it's an approach to development and no amount of time changes it.Thank you Andrew for sharing your side of the story. We can see that the relationship with Bun and Jarred was far from easy. You say it with your own words and even if it sounds bitter I like it much more than some bland AI assisted content.
So is this guy going to dress down any project that decides to move off of Zig? If Mitchell Hashimoto decides to move Ghostty off of Zig to C or Rust will we get a scathing blog post about that too?
Dedicating most of the article to a personal attack and then finishing by saying that you don't have anything against the person is a bit of an odd sequence.
Am I right in thinking the Bun rewrite hasn't actually been released yet? There was a big kerfuffle when it was merged to master and people seemed to be behaving like that meant it was all done and dusted (as does this article), but it looks like the last release is still 1.3.14 from April so presumably general users are still on the Zig version? Is there a timeline for release?
It's shipping soon https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust and has been shipping in Claude Code for the last three weeks https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust .
Bun's bundler claimed the bottom place in my recent analysis of how JavaScript tools handle generating inline script tags[1], because despite making lofty promises about being able to bundle applications into standalone HTML files, it produced a baffling combination of spurious syntax errors and miscompilations when presented with tricky code.
I'm pretty sure the version I tested was the Zig one (have they made a stable release of the Rust rewrite yet?). So I can definitely see how Bun's move-fast-and-break-things philosophy would have been a poor fit for the Zig community, even prior to the Rust rewrite.
[1] https://carter.sande.duodecima.technology/inline-script-pitf...
i think the blog post was very honest and direct and i could not agree more with andrew, now i’m not a zig user and i don’t find the language itself pleasing but it’s just a matter of taste,
i admire a few things in zig community, the focus on human relationship with learning and discovery and the focus on performance and building a meaningful relationship with members of community, I wish all the best to the zig and its community, although i have heard a few years ago that andrew was making apologies for not having enough diversity (race and skin colour wise) which i guess was a very dumb statement, but hey we all make dumb statements!
I really admire his stance on AI and agentic code contribution and the joy that they find in crafting good tools.
When I read about the bun rewrite I thought no sh*t, those are the exactly the types of bugs I would expect when doing a line by line rewrite of a program in a GC language to memory managed.
I was unimpressed with the engineering from the blog, and I'm not surprised to read andrew say they claimed no fuzz testing. I know someone who interviewed at bun when it was less than 10 people (around 5 he said). Allegedly jared lowballed the fk out of my friend, claimed they had no money because they're a startup, then proceeded to offer <1% equity
I think I'm missing something; neither zig nor rust are GC languages. Did bun originally start off in javascript or something, and the rewrite you're referring to is from JS to zig?
First line of the original article (not including the disclosure)
> Bun started as a line-for-line port of esbuild's JavaScript & TypeScript transpiler from Go to Zig
Then proceeded to talk about use after free bugs, leaks, and other things that wouldn't exist in GC written programs. Ironically, my friend jared lowballed is an expert in C, runtimes and threading
> The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.
Interesting I wonder if its something Jarred did locally or something else that was just not widely done by the whole team? I dont like to make bad assumptions about devs or dev teams without first asking. I owe credit to HN for one of the guidelines which states something like do not assume intentional malice in comments, I feel like we assume the worst in general about other devs, but people are imperfect and make mistakes.
That said as others noted this post could have been written a bit differently while still pointing out genuine issues. The ad hominem attacks are a bit unnecessary and add nothing of value to what could have been a better response.
It's more like a transpile, far from idiomatic rust.
I've watched an interview with Andrew Kelley: https://youtu.be/iqddnwKF8HQ where he seemed much more chill and level-headed.
The callout about auditing inline and comptime reminds exactly of the C++ point made about how you have to follow the style guide. Whoosh?
Zig is getting that Elm, etc vibe. Genius/visionary BFDL who's also personally incapable of leading the project towards healthy long-term viability.
Say what you will about Matz or José Valim, I don't think they'd ever write a "and don't let the door hit you on the way out" screed full of personal attacks ("stinky manager", "writing slop", "a total shit show") against a person who led a very prominent project and financially supported the language.
Other people (not meaning this about you) very frequently seem to throw around the BFDL acronym uncritically without remembering or caring that Benevolent is the first word in there.
This blog post is mostly made up of pettiness and is not an isolated incident - he is often pretty "spicy" or downright hostile in comments sections when making an appearance.
I am sorry but andrew is no where near the level of Evan imo
I like zig a lot, I share its core philosophy, and I generally agree with Andrew's views. I found this article interesting, and I think it is understandable in all of this to be a bit bitter towards Bun and Jarred - in some sense, it had turned into a big "If you don't use Rust in 2026 you are stupid" which directly hurts the Zig project.
Personally, I prefer zig over most other languages. I find "memory-safety" is bought at the price of code that is not straightforward to reason about and requiring a steep learning curve. The reader's working memory is filled up quickly with language constructs and crutches rather than with the actual logic of the code at hand. I have used C++ for a large part of my professional career and eventually got so annoyed by always having to cross-reference multiple files to check which behavior might be used by which constructor and things like that. I have written a big and critical system in pure C once, just to try, and while I would not do it again, diligence and testing resulted in virtually zero runtime failures across its lifespan - while it was always possible to quickly reason about all the logic that tied low-level hardware access and near-realtime requirements together in a way much more visible than hidden behind layers of "safe" abstraction. Zig is, for me, the sweet spot: It solves the terrible issues that plain C has, and adds a lot of convenience on top that does not obscure the logic, while encouraging but not enforcing safe patterns.
I'm glad LLM coding exists for people who want to move at an insane superhuman speed (perhaps they're trying to achieve escape velocity and launch into the stars or something) so that they don't grind down their fellow humans.
You can either do local optimization - a single individual moving as fast and as hard as humanly possible, or global optimization - a team working together and amplifying each other's efforts to produce something that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Never heard of Bun or Jarred before today I enjoyed his blog post about the migration to rust, it is an impressive feat if real ! I didnt see anything bad about Zig in the post, on the contrary it shows respect and that big projects can be done in Zig
Next, I read Andrew's post, and the thing I see is: Jarred looks like an achiever, Andrew more like a butthurt childish whiner I also can see why Jarred made the migration, it is not only technical, and it was a great call IMHO
I for one appreciate a public figure with a wildly opposed mindset to the Silicon Valley/VC-Funded/Ultrascaling/whatever crowd.
The pushback is warranted and on point, especially the technical points. It has taken a suspicious amount of time to produce the fabled blog post which I don't think states almost any new information beyond what Jarred has already shared on twitter. The one (and very interesting) exception is the theoretical price of the rewrite via the API pricing.
[dead]
Why do I feel like reading the post of someone jealous or with low self esteem issues? Zig was not a good fit so why does it have to be a personal attack on the Bun maintainer over his life choices and his management decisions? Whatever beef you have with someone it should not be « zig is for elite and you are just an evil corporate maintainer because you are holding it wrong »
It feels like the first half of blog post is less of "thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite" and more "I don't like Jarred, he's a bad programmer and manager".
Maybe I'm wrong, but it strongly feels this way. I'm not saying that Andrew is right or wrong, it's just that you could throw out most of the first half of the post and not lose anything actually on topic.
> But having graduated from the Thiel Fellowship school of thought rather than university, he was essentially groomed from a young age into uncritically embracing the Silicon Valley mindset, and he took venture capital.
> Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective.
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
Andrew is right. I’m sure his emotions come through here, but his take on these things lines up with everything I’ve seen.
Same. After following the drama on HN and Twitter it's pretty clear Jarred has been intentionally doing something that's hurting Zig/Bun community. What I've seen check out with those statements in the post
To me, most on HN have drank the AI koolaid (and/or are financially invested in it), and God forbid a direct and personal critique on a project owned by Anthropic!
We must not let the shareholder value fall /s
You only need to follow Jarred/Bun's own comments on Twitter/HN to figure things out, where selective info were posted based on some agenda instead of clearing things up, aka communication
I find the pro-AI and anti-AI somewhat inconsistent, where I had either side strongly reacting to my comments. I personally didn't expect so much support for Bun in this thread.
I mean I wouldn’t want to work for Andrew Kelley either. Doesn’t mean I don’t see utility in zig. Taking swings at a pretty toxic culture (silicon valley) while refreshing also paints a target on your back. This isn’t unhinged shit though so it hasn’t dissuaded me from learning Zig
> The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it.
I was on a platform team and I had a constant backlog of bugs (introduced by others) that I was working on and the two most impactful things for preventing bugs were Typescript and Cypress (playwright-like testing before playwright).
I've dealt with many shitty code bases and the only way that worked for removing bugs was automation. It didn't matter how many bodies you threw at the problem.
> Then why are you saying you have so many annoying bugs in the Zig code? What happened to the test suite being sufficient to catch everything?
You can't use tests for trying to catch use after frees and other memory bugs for the same reason you can't use unit tests as a replacement for type checking, the combinatorial explosion of possible inputs into functions makes unit testing types across an entire project impossible.
Anyway, Jared donated $60k a year to this project and tried to resolve this in the most diplomatic way possible and still got personally attacked. The lesson from this article is don't donate to the Zig project because if you migrate away from it they will try to ruin your reputation.
edit: changed month to year
> Anyway, Jared donated $60k a month to this project
$60k per year, which amounts to $5k per month. Still, nothing to be sneered at.
While I understand ZSF's bittersweet relationship with Oven and agree to several points (especially preparedness), this writing is badly structured and that shows something. Hope to see him turning around.
The post reads like someone who is quite upset but trying to maintain professionalism. The mask slips throughout.
The points seem valid, however, and I will likely steer clear of Bun.
Disclaimer: I'm bullish on Rust. And I think LLMs are overhyped, and kind of overhated.
Honestly, I think it would have been better if he had done the smart thing and ignored the noise around Bun's Zig -> Rust, and focused on code.
If he was willing to ride the coattails of Zig being hyped by Bun, then he should have taken the hit when Zig and Bun parted ways.
Hell, if he is that happy that they are leaving, he shouldn't have written that he is happy. Just smile and wave...
So now Jarred wrote a very matter-of-fact post about migrating Bun to Rust, and Andrew Kelley wrote a ranty blog about Jarred sucking at Zig, and being glad he's gone.
When you said that “His code was slop well before LLMs” got a good cackle out of me.
The fact is, most people don’t have taste and haven’t had taste, LLMs just amplify what was already there. Good taste is good taste, slop is slop, and shit is shit.
Glad you guys were able to go your separate ways.
Nice writing by Andrew IMO, please don’t be discouraged by people criticizing the writing style, it is firmly on the lighter side of what I would expect. It even feels a bit passive aggressive to me so it would be better have a more direct and harsh writing style maybe?
As a side note, never trust someone saying they use fuzz testing just because they say so. Odds are they don’t even understand what fuzz testing is.
And it was glaringly obvious they don’t know how to program in this context from their complaints around memory safety. The issue should never that the code randomly segfaults, it should only be it maybe exploitable in an adversarial scenario.
For all comments that will write something like “I can’t believe how rude this is”:
No one really care about this, there are real problems in life, please get a grip, you are just being annoying
> he could have easily achieved a solid living via crowdfunding, even for San Francisco standards.
That sounds completely surreal. Is Bun really used that much?
That is a 100% on point analysis, there was a lot of hype around Bun since the beginning when it was an invite only project. Arguably that same interest is what got Jarred VC funding in the first place.
Note that usage and public interest are not the same quantity, people also care about the potential of a project.
A project getting hype does not mean that same project could sustain itself through crowdfunding.
> We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. > Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
Ufff, the creator of zig saying that the biggest zig project is slop was definitly not on my bingo card.
Its sad to see that on of the biggest projects was more or less badly written zig code. On that note, I wonder which big project have good zig code?
Ghostty, TigerBeatle. The other two poster children.
> The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it.
Why don't YOU spend the engineering resources to add RAII and a borrow checker instead of blaming your users?
Related:
Rewriting Bun in Rust
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837877
Is the bun rewrite actually done? There's no tag for the release, and as it stands robobun has almost 1.3k open PRs on the repo: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pulls/robobun
It doesn't look done.
And it looks like work on the rewrite began in early may: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/commit/46d3bc29f270fa881dd573...
So... its more like a 2 month rewrite that is definitely not done yet????
From the rewrite to Rust article:
> 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.
It's also been shipping with Claude Code since June 17th.
It's been shipping in the company that's success is partly contingent on it shipping? But there's no release? Curious.
I’m not sure why this post even exists? It feels completely unnecessary. Don’t get me wrong, I like drama as much as the next guy, but it didn’t have to be public imo
I read the post and roughly summarized it as:
1.It felt uncomfortable that Bun was presented as a representative example of Zig. From the internal Zig perspective, it looked more like a bad example of how to use Zig.
2.It felt uncomfortable that they spoke as if Rust prevents things that could actually be handled by Zig's style guide.
3.I(OP,andrewkelly) don't think badly of Jarred as a person, but after signing a contract with VC, the management side has been poor.
4.The Bun documentation looked like marketing.
5.Bad contributions driven by AI came through indirect promotion of Bun, which attracted interest from people after it was acquired by Antropic.
I understand that it's burdensome to see Bun as Zig's representative success story, and I get the wish not to see Rust rewrites through a lens of language superiority. But on the flip side, I'm not sure I would have ever learned about Zig if not for Bun.
While the criticism is valid, I also understand Bun's position. After all, Antropic's acquisition of Bun was ultimately about showing that even a 'new language' can be used effectively with AI, and that's precisely where the friction arose.
I think the refusal to accept AI from a purely human programmer perspective is a matter of personal values, and I find the Zig team admirable on a human level. (Though I'm an active proponent of AI, so my view differs.)
Both sides have valid points, but sometimes I wish someone would turn the emotional and political dynamics of open source into a novel. I think it would be fascinating
> 2.It felt uncomfortable that they spoke as if Rust prevents things that could actually be handled by Zig's style guide.
"Handled by Zig's style guide" ends up as "Don't make mistakes" which is entirely useless advice. C++ spent years trying to make out that this constitutes useful guidance before gradually accepting that people aren't in fact going to stop making mistakes, you need to provide a better language and tools.
I agree with some points as well. In fact, the OP argues that sufficient engineering attention can solve the problem, but I think that's only theoretical in reality, it's difficult. It's like C programmers claiming that undefined behavior is manageable.
Not accepting a PR because it was purely written by AI is like saying PRs will only be accepted if the developer used a standing desk for more than 75% of the time during the code's creation. In the end, as long as the code is not shit, who cares how the sausage was made!
I find it hard to believe you actually think those two things are similar or equivalent. I've heard many bad analogies in my life but this is so funny that it makes me think you're being sarcastic.
We have the potential to get along really well, but this isn't really the right comment thread for that, haha
*Ben
Sorry. Sometimes I can't remember the English spelling. Thanks for the correction. i've fixed it
Such a refreshing take after all the marketing nonsense from Bun. Zig is a glimmer of hope in a world of slop.
>We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. Abuse of assertions. Most of all, recklessly speeding past feature after feature with very little time taken for reflection and elimination of bugs and technical debt.
I'd like to know what the poor code quality in Bun looks like. Does anybody have concrete examples?
The project needs an adult in the room - preferably someone less on the spectrum - who approves this content before it goes out. This reads as an incredibly butthurt, petulant rant, authored by someone deeply hurt that users are putting all the blocks into the square hole. Andrew would have been served better by a Linus-style curt takedown, rather than this drivel.
Agreed. Valid criticism and concerns are drowned out by personal feelings. Probably should have ran his post by an AI.
> preferably someone less on the spectrum
Are you implying that this reads as all those bad things because Andrew is supposedly autistic? And that if he were to not supposedly have autism, this post wouldn't have read as all those bad things? This reads as an incredibly ableist post authored by someone who thinks autism is an insurmountably negative thing and that someone with "sufficient" autism shouldn't run a project. As if autism is a percentage where once you get past 33% you immediately become incompetent. Be better.
Oh man you'd love Bluesky. No one else cares about 2018 tech twitter "ist" bullshit anymore. Get bent.
The video he links to at the end is such a strong message, somehow able to celebrate the promise of AI while not afraid to point out whats complicated, or even fraught there. AI is, truly, a reflection of ourselves, our own hangups, prejudice, desire. Its both what draws us to it, but also inspires us to be critical. Thanks for the prescient reminder there OP.
So bun went from bad Zig code to absolute slop Rust code?
Yes, but at least now its memory safe.
Allegedly.
This is 2017 Biden vs Trump for people who know who Godbolt is
Andrew sounds whiney. His reasoning seems sound until he begins to attribute Bun for an uptick in drive-by slop contributions.
The man may need some time to decompress, away from social media.
While I agree that the Zig code in Bun could be better, and that the Silicon Valley pressure to move fast and break things prevented a lot of suggested improvements, this feels like the same argument as people who write C or C++ where people think they wouldn’t make mistakes.
For example this section
> We've been trying to warn you about your comptime abuse for years.
You could replace comptime with templates in C++ and it would be the same story. People will abuse features you put in the language. Is C++ a good language that people are just using wrong? According to Bjarne Stroustrup yes, and the C++ core guidelines fixes those issues, but a lot of people seem to disagree. Don't believe me here is an interview where he talks about memory safety in C++? ^1
> Ryan: One thing that I think C++ is uh infamous for is kind of like memory safety issues or kind of foot guns that exist there.
> Bjarne: I'm so tired of that. Um I haven't had those problems for years. Um, and somebody did a a study of the obvious problems with buffer overflows and um people hacking in using that kind of stuff and uh almost all of the uh these cases when people writing C style code or in C and uh Herb Server has a a talk with with actual numbers and they they are quite significant. It's it's sort of that kind of problems more than 90% are for people that don't write modern C++. They they use raw pointers to pass things around without um the number of elements. No fat pointers, no spans. um you you have them in C++. You can use them. You can use uh vectors. We have hardened libraries. Everybody has hardened libraries that that does the runtime checking. Uh Apple has it. Google has it. Microsoft has it. It's just not standard till now. C++ 26 has a hardened option that are standard. uh and the work I'm doing on profiles will give you a way of guaranteeing that you don't do the stupid things. Um so anyway, uh fundamentally theoretically the problem was solved many years ago and people just do what they've always done and get the problems they've always had. And uh that makes me sad and uh it's one of the things that makes me work on uh coding guidelines and on enforced profiles and on education. I mean education is one way to solve the problem. Is there a way to get the compiler to just prevent people from doing all those risky things? And is that enabled by default in modern C++ today? No, but it should be. I'm proposing that for C++ 29. Uh the simpler versions of that should have been in in in uh C++ 26, but there are still a lot of people even in the C++ standards committee that are very devoted to uh their old code and their old ways of doing things. Um there's people who says you should only standardize what is common in industry. But when the bugs are common in industry, you should do something else.
Is this going to be Zig's answers to real issues that people have in the real world? I'd argue that's not good enough for a modern systems programming language.
> We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. Abuse of assertions. Most of all, recklessly speeding past feature after feature with very little time taken for reflection and elimination of bugs and technical debt.
The vast majority of software is written by businesses, who have to cater to the lowest common denominator in their code base, including slop programmers, pre or post llm. They are not incentivized to go slower. We will never see a mass adoption of Tiger Style programming (though I would be happy to be proven wrong). That is the reality of what we need programming languages to help with in 2026. I've never met a professional programmer that has not seen or said the same thing about a code base that they've worked on.
New programming languages need to contend with that reality if they want to be adopted en masse. If not they are doomed to not be adopted (which is okay I've created many programming languages that are just for me). But if a programming language in never adopted then the supposed benefits or improvements of the language never trickle down to us the users of the software, so they just remain interesting ideas (which again is okay).
> This attention could have been harnessed in a few different ways. For example, he could have easily achieved a solid living via crowdfunding, even for San Francisco standards.
Andrew kelley runs a tight ship, and his foundation does not need a lot of money to keep going, but he has talked about how working on all the organizational transparency is not his favorite part of the project, and I can see why a lot of young programmers wouldn’t want to go that way.
Now let me be clear I actually like Zig, and have promoted it on Hacker News before, and written some code myself. I actual uses Zigcc in one of my projects because it makes my life easier. I genuinely love the tooling of Zig, and I feel like the language respects my time. I want the language to succeed
I also think that Andrew Kelley is a principled man with good engineering sense, and has turned down opportunities that would have made him a lot more money, were he to violate his own principles. That is admirable, and he has demonstrated it on so many occasions that it is currently not a question to me. What I would like to see, and what Andrew has said Zig focuses is how Zig can improve program correctness even more, without requiring me, or my coworkers to be a 10x programmer
1. https://youtu.be/U46fJ2bJ-co?t=2780
I agree with some of your points, but I think the Safe C++ project will be difficult because it would require breaking backward compatibility with existing projects. Honestly, I also don't agree with the claim that 'if you manage it well, data races and memory safety errors won't happen.' However, C++ already has so many projects built on it that breaking backward compatibility would cause serious problems. I think it might be better to just switch to a different language altogether.
I notice something more interesting. This post shows Andrew to not only personally criticise Ben but also clearly shows an ideological stance against AI. I can see it from multiple angles - refusing AI PR's, refusing Anthropic's donation and multiple other things.
Either this ideology helps Zig position itself as a hand crafted language. Or this ideology is self defeating.
This is quite an interesting read from Andrew's perspective. But one line tells me everything I needed to know.
> The blog post is expertly written. It's almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article.
Even Andrew knew that this was going to be Anthropic's marketing opportunity for AI to rewrite Bun from Zig into Rust. This post from Jarred says it all. [0] If you have access to hundreds of billions worth of resources (infinite tokens and compute), they don't care what others think and some relationships are just cheap to discard.
Like I said before in [1] and [2], Bun (now Anthropic) does not care about you. They did this to market the capabilities of their AI models and this rewrite was an example of that in broad daylight. Even if Zig allowed AI generated contributions, this move was going to happen anyway.
I cannot believe that many commenters in [0] at the time did not see that this rewrite was eventually going to happen.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48240829
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073893
Yeah 100% they were going to do this anyways.
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