It is yet to be determined whether or not the bun rewrite is a success, though.

Right. So let's hold our horses and wait for the release before disparaging anyone.

I do have to agree with the author about Jarred's false claims about release dates though. Really not sure why he keeps doing that.

What are the standards for determining that?

The most obvious benefit Rust can give them is being safe from memory leaks. This is hardly controversial: it has been a Zig design choice that memory leaks are the developer/user's responsibility. They have already demonstrated to have fixed several of those [0].

Marketing-wise, it has been an obvious success. Dunno if that matters.

[0] https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust

Rust also doesn't prevent memory leaks: you can create memory leaks through reference cycles just fine in rust.

Who cares?

People who don’t want to run out of memory?

Are the Rust programmers who suffered from memory leaks through reference cycles in the room with you right now?

Yes? I’ve made that mistake, it’s not particularly hard to do. Stash an Arc in something that lives too long, or forget to clear its inner data structure when you should, and you have a leak.

That’s not like … a design flaw or something, just a common class of error Rust can’t save you from.

> What are the standards for determining that?

Seems pretty simple to me: if the software works, the port has been successful.

If this is unsatisfactory, another way to think about the question is to ask "what would make you conclude it has failed?" That requires a sharp choice.

> Marketing-wise, it has been an obvious success. Dunno if that matters.

What's interesting tho it's that it can go from apparent marketing success to a big failure as the release keeps getting postponed.

Seems like they just released 1.4 though.

Great! It's finally Monday.

Watch this:

People _really_ want there to be success stories for llms and they will go through all lengths to discredit and disparage folks questioning the space.

Both of these are true. I recall Anthropic's lofty claims about their C compiler. It just did not work, and they claimed all of this and that. It was clear they were driven to believe that agents alone could write a C compiler, and refused to believe they couldn't. Not that I think that AI couldn't write a C compiler. It definitely can... with a human at the helm and sufficient time.

But, for people who don't like AI, they also refuse to believe that AI could be good at any particular workflow. Which is just obviously not true, there are workflows that AI is really good at. Language re-writes are one of them. They're almost mechanical in nature and trivial to check via tests. So, the perfect use-case for an LLM.

I'm not saying the Bun re-write is any good, but the underlying concept is sound. If ever there was a tool to do a language re-write, it would be a high quality LLM.

It isn't LLMs in general, from what I can tell. It was how this port was done and communicated.

It was communicated fine, can you be more specific ?

No, it wasn't. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226

you really went digging with that 3 months old hn comment. What's wrong with that comment btw? Are you saying he was lying and they did in fact commit to the rewrite at that point?

I didn't dig. It was prominent at the time this occurred, because like I said, it wasn't communicated at all until they were already in the middle of it.

And yes, I think he was not genuine there and that they had indeed fully committed to the rewrite prior to that point and comment.

If you're not aware of any of this, how are you arguing it was communicated clearly?

but, importantly, it is not the main reason why people are skeptical of bun rewrite right