> The last three months have not looked good for Bun.
Apart from pro-AI or anti-AI posturing how have the last few months not looked good for Bun, exactly? I use it daily and I've seen basically zero regressions. I get it, you don't like AI or you like Zig over Rust, or whatever. I just haven't seen any serious argument that Bun has somehow become worse software.
> The project has over 5k open pull requests, which is the largest number of pull requests I’ve seen.
Terrible argument, and not really an argument at all.
> The biggest worry is, of course, the code itself.
I agree, so look at the code and point out what's wrong with it.
Insofar as Andrew Kelley is concerned, it's obvious he has an axe to grind and is salty about Bun embarassing Zig (which he freely admits). Not sure why you'd invoke an unreliable narrator as some sort of final nail in the coffin.
All that sounds great. The promised of shipping for months that never came is a concern, comparatively speaking to history of the project and what is happening. But if we have user feedback suggest otherwise may be it is good.
For most, they are still waiting for official release so they could make their own judgment, the problem is that it is still not released. I guess we should just wait a little longer.
>> The project has over 5k open pull requests, which is the largest number of pull requests I’ve seen.
> Terrible argument, and not really an argument at all.
Technically, maybe.
But when you consider for a moment that in this pile of slop some PRs were crafted by actual people who trusted Bun and Jarred... and whose trust has been flushed down the toilet by the Rust rewrite. Well, maybe that's the price of progress. Or maybe that's a grave mistake.
The bun rewrite is looked to as proof that this sort of full-throttle
vibecoding is the future of software development, at least for large porting projects like this one, and for many people on this site that is a high stakes question.
To prove that, a proper release is needed, and the Bun community needs to adopt it. There's a huge partisan eagerness to declare the Claude Code release or anecdotal experiences on the canary as victory, but the viability of 1.4 hasn't been demonstrated until it has been released and adopted by the bulk of the community.
There isn't actually any hurry on that. Nobody needs Bun 1.4 tomorrow. It's Jarred that keeps saying it'll be released tomorrow, while the code churns at an astonishing rate (see below). People with a skeptical outlook will inevitably suspect that he doesn't have confidence in the release and is struggling to acquire it.
Github insights for the last week:
> Excluding merges, 57 authors have pushed 349 commits to main and 6892 commits to all branches.
> On main, 2026 files have changed and there have been 189,502 additions and 133,836 deletions
Sure but that’s how you beta test a runtime, by using it in a codebase you control. Claude is publicly released and used widely, that’s still only a single codebase
So they are being more cautious and spending more time on polish after a never been done before historical massive rewrite...? Stop the press! They are not shipping as fast they used to! Omg!
> So they are being more cautious and spending more time on polish after a never been done before historical massive rewrite...?
That's not credible at all. I mean, after a major release there are tons of low-priority low-hanging fruit issues that can be quickly sorted out. That's the nature of a release process.
However, Bun stopped releasing anything. Even after lauding it's AI push,which can easily chomp through small tickets.
It's been a couple of months since the major push. I repeat: the release cadence of a mature, stable codebase as the Zig one was at 2-3 weeks. A messy rust rewrite packed with unsafe code, which is prime ground for small bugfixes and correctness fixes, led the project to grind to a halt.
Not surprising, but Jarred has been teasing "tomorrow I swear" for months and Bun keeps missing his own deadlines.
There's clearly something wrong in their confidence about Rust Bun: If it isn't ready they should have said "whenever it's done", and if it is they'd have met some deadline by now. I suspect the speed was supposed to be part of the stunt, yet they seem to have encountered the 90:90 rule.
The rewrite was a lot faster. Actually shaking out the bugs from the rewrite (or just getting enough confidence in the new version from use by early adopters) is probably not going to be drastically faster.
That was 11,000 lines of dead code removed from pre-rust Bun. In a million lines of vibed Rust Bun I'd be astonished if there was a mere 11,000 unused LoC. Noticing unused code isn't a strength of LLMs in my experience.
I mean, how do you check that your frontend code (possibly not even managed by your team) is calling and needs all of your backend endpoints? I'm sure it can be done, and it probably should, but saying it should always be 0% is not very pragmatic.
Dead code likely means chunks of code not used by other chunks of code, which should be easy to determine statically in most modern languages. Whether an exposed endpoint is being hit (used) or not as an API is more of a test-code-coverage thing, different from the concept of "dead code".
True, but Bun actually has a similar problem. It's creating bindings to a JS runtime. If the JS glue code then no longer uses it, the code is still marked as alive because it's registered with the runtime.
In a previous life I managed to deliver a system with (basic-block) coverage measurement compiled in (gcov) but instead of the mess of files gcov generates, the whole coverage structure was streamed to a remote server (it compressed very well). Once that was in place it was an amazing telemetry tool.
Later on used Intel Processor Trace in a similar fashion for even finer (mc-dc) coverage.
Coverage tools are very useful, if a bit hard to use...
First of all, I'd need to see a diff on that. It's insane to make that kind of claim without backing it up. Second of all, dead code (as in truly dead code: like an if statement that is guaranteed to never be true), is optimized away by the compiler. So even if we had all this dead code, it is not an issue that would ever impact the final product. Third of all, the Bun runtime consists of over a million lines of code, so that figure (again, even if true) is insignificant.
> It's insane to make that kind of claim without backing it up.
A bizarre accusation. It's a fork of Bun that says they removed the dead code. All you have to do to see the diffs is look at its history. Most of the commits are code removal.
It's a fork of Zig bun, though, not Rust, so hardly relevant to the AI argument.
Apart from pro-AI or anti-AI posturing how have the last few months not looked good for Bun, exactly? I use it daily and I've seen basically zero regressions. I get it, you don't like AI or you like Zig over Rust, or whatever. I just haven't seen any serious argument that Bun has somehow become worse software.
> The project has over 5k open pull requests, which is the largest number of pull requests I’ve seen.
Terrible argument, and not really an argument at all.
> The biggest worry is, of course, the code itself.
I agree, so look at the code and point out what's wrong with it.
Insofar as Andrew Kelley is concerned, it's obvious he has an axe to grind and is salty about Bun embarassing Zig (which he freely admits). Not sure why you'd invoke an unreliable narrator as some sort of final nail in the coffin.