On one hand I kinda feel validated for having jumped ship on Zig 3+ Years ago[1] and moving everything to Rust[2], with the language simply being too unstable and unsafe in my eyes, despite my love for comptime and people arguing that Bun and Tigerbeetle were proof that it wasn't the languages fault.
But I also feel bad for the Zig project to loose one of their flagship projects, because while I find the project ultimately anachronistic, I know what it's like to pour your sweat, heart and soul into something,
and having it replaced within a week is a sobering experience even from afar.
A couple years ago this would have been unthinkable because of how slow legacy codebases and rewrites are.
I wonder if Tigerbeetle will also have problems arguing for their solution now that the other project they can point to for customer assurance is gone. And I wonder if they will follow suit eventually simply due to marketing pressure (after having been bitten by the Zig compiler I was surprised that they were putting their super duper high reliability database on top of it at all, but with another big player using it there was at least some peace of mind for their enterprise customers).
> I wonder if Tigerbeetle will also have problems arguing for their solution now that the other project they can point to for customer assurance is gone.
In general, we never like to appeal to popularity (a logical fallacy), but why would you assume here that we would point to Bun specifically (or any project for that matter) [1] as an example of Zig’s quality?
We prefer to judge Zig’s quality on its own intrinsic merit:
For example, we subject the language through TigerBeetle to inordinate amounts of fuzzing, perhaps more than any other language (you could say Zig is lucky to have TB’s test suite aimed against it!).
Literally 1,024 dedicated CPU cores, 24/7.
Zig holds up remarkably well.
We also recently pledged $512K to the ZSF, together with Synadia.
These are the kinds of things we prefer to point to. Not hype, but real end-to-end systems engineering, and long term financial support, regardless of the language we choose to use.
[1] I picked Zig back in July 2020. At the time, the largest project was River, but already Zig was a phenomenal choice, and the years have only shown that Zig was probably one of the best design decisions in the development of TigerBeetle. It turned out better than I imagined.
Tigerbeetle is in the database business. They operate on an entire different level of correctness expectations compared to something like Bun. The correctness guarantees they provide come first and foremost from the design, architecture and rigorous testing, not from the language they use for the implementation.
So, hopefully, the tech people involved in choosing a database for their project understand that, and do their own correctness and performance testing before making a decision. As for the business people, the tigerbeetle.com landing page doesn't mention Zig at all, although it probably will come up when they "ask AI" for a comparison. So, yeah, probably some risk. Perhaps the LLM will also point out the Jepsen report on Tigerbeetle to offset it.
> not from the language they use for the implementation.
Everybody has a plan until their compiler compiles an if-else wrong, and that's the level of instability that Zig had when I left it and Tigerbeetle committed to it.
No amount of testing is going to save you from that and it's a completely avoidable unnecessary self-inflicted problem, as a technical person that makes me seriously doubt every other decision you make on top of that. So I feel like they've already been fighting an uphill battle, where they have to proof that they have a stable system, despite an unconventional early stage foundation, and I feel like that it just got even harder.
My hot take is Anthropic is going to have a really rough year as they’re going to start to feel the weight of all their vibe coding and products.
I have a hard time believing they have something figured out that the rest of software engineers don’t. I’ve been using LLMs to help code since before claude code and heavily since. I have a hard enough time managing the “slop” from 4-5 agents. I can’t imagine this is going to go well having this done in like a week.
Anecdotally, I am seeing tons of visual bugs in software and apps these days.
Issues of rendering, too many menu options, mobile sizes not being accounted for per se, non-functioning buttons, half-load issues, etc. Consumer facing, major platforms, commercial services.
I can’t ascribe all of it to LLMs but there’s been an objective change in my impotent cursing from “what is wrong with them” to “did anyone even test this?” over the last six months to a year. If the backends start acting like these frontends we might get to see a bunch of cognitive/technical debt blow up at scale.
100% agree on this. Even just the flashing on nav menus. Very very common to load an app I'm already signed in to, see the "login / signup" state first, then a loading indicator or skeleton, then the logged in state. Just seems like amateur hour all over the place of people or companies not caring.
Given how terrible their in-house support bot is, I don't think they've figured out jack shit. If you truly had a half-decent LLM, you'd think the first place you'd put it to demonstrate the capabilities is handling support.
Does anybody know what model they are using? Is that Mythos?
This is impressive. I honestly don't know what to think about programming careers, need to reflect on my role in this area. The only thing that comes to mind the that quote from Cypher (Matrix):
"Buckle your seat belt, Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye-bye."
Yeah the next generation is understanding the codebase vs understanding how to prompt the info out of the codebase.
I too took on the rust port of a working software, learned some LLM roadbumps, and it looks very much like the future is LLM coded and human "managed"
Regardless of your optimism about LLMs, it seems crazy to expect an entire runtime to be stable after this kind of refactoring pass. I would be skeptical if humans did it too. Rust isn’t magical; it can still compile with bugs despite what some people claim.
I missed what the reason given for moving from zig to rust was. Considering 9 days ago it was "This whole thread is an overreaction."
Is it really just that Anthropic now owns bun and zig is "anti-LLM" for contributions? Was there more justification given elsewhere?
> Security risks: None. This is dead-code removal
Thanks Claude! XD
On one hand I kinda feel validated for having jumped ship on Zig 3+ Years ago[1] and moving everything to Rust[2], with the language simply being too unstable and unsafe in my eyes, despite my love for comptime and people arguing that Bun and Tigerbeetle were proof that it wasn't the languages fault.
But I also feel bad for the Zig project to loose one of their flagship projects, because while I find the project ultimately anachronistic, I know what it's like to pour your sweat, heart and soul into something, and having it replaced within a week is a sobering experience even from afar.
A couple years ago this would have been unthinkable because of how slow legacy codebases and rewrites are.
I wonder if Tigerbeetle will also have problems arguing for their solution now that the other project they can point to for customer assurance is gone. And I wonder if they will follow suit eventually simply due to marketing pressure (after having been bitten by the Zig compiler I was surprised that they were putting their super duper high reliability database on top of it at all, but with another big player using it there was at least some peace of mind for their enterprise customers).
1: https://github.com/triblespace/tribles-zig
2: https://github.com/triblespace/triblespace-rs
[Since your comment is a duplicate from another thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48135476, I’m duplicating my reply to you there]
> I wonder if Tigerbeetle will also have problems arguing for their solution now that the other project they can point to for customer assurance is gone.
In general, we never like to appeal to popularity (a logical fallacy), but why would you assume here that we would point to Bun specifically (or any project for that matter) [1] as an example of Zig’s quality?
We prefer to judge Zig’s quality on its own intrinsic merit:
For example, we subject the language through TigerBeetle to inordinate amounts of fuzzing, perhaps more than any other language (you could say Zig is lucky to have TB’s test suite aimed against it!).
Literally 1,024 dedicated CPU cores, 24/7.
Zig holds up remarkably well.
We also recently pledged $512K to the ZSF, together with Synadia.
These are the kinds of things we prefer to point to. Not hype, but real end-to-end systems engineering, and long term financial support, regardless of the language we choose to use.
[1] I picked Zig back in July 2020. At the time, the largest project was River, but already Zig was a phenomenal choice, and the years have only shown that Zig was probably one of the best design decisions in the development of TigerBeetle. It turned out better than I imagined.
Tigerbeetle is in the database business. They operate on an entire different level of correctness expectations compared to something like Bun. The correctness guarantees they provide come first and foremost from the design, architecture and rigorous testing, not from the language they use for the implementation.
So, hopefully, the tech people involved in choosing a database for their project understand that, and do their own correctness and performance testing before making a decision. As for the business people, the tigerbeetle.com landing page doesn't mention Zig at all, although it probably will come up when they "ask AI" for a comparison. So, yeah, probably some risk. Perhaps the LLM will also point out the Jepsen report on Tigerbeetle to offset it.
> not from the language they use for the implementation.
Everybody has a plan until their compiler compiles an if-else wrong, and that's the level of instability that Zig had when I left it and Tigerbeetle committed to it.
No amount of testing is going to save you from that and it's a completely avoidable unnecessary self-inflicted problem, as a technical person that makes me seriously doubt every other decision you make on top of that. So I feel like they've already been fighting an uphill battle, where they have to proof that they have a stable system, despite an unconventional early stage foundation, and I feel like that it just got even harder.
its giving fud
Read through the stuff yourself if you don't believe me: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20label%3...
https://archive.org/details/flash_allyourbase
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48132488 ("Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged" - 170 points - 5 hours ago - 159 comments)
RIP bun, it was good to know you.
The linked PR has been flagged as AI slop, but there seems to be an equivalent PR that's still open: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30683
The PR says it was from Jarred, and then he flags his own PR as slop...
My hot take is Anthropic is going to have a really rough year as they’re going to start to feel the weight of all their vibe coding and products.
I have a hard time believing they have something figured out that the rest of software engineers don’t. I’ve been using LLMs to help code since before claude code and heavily since. I have a hard enough time managing the “slop” from 4-5 agents. I can’t imagine this is going to go well having this done in like a week.
If you think that it will, I implore you to attempt the same in your large existing codebase and report back the mess. Theirs is littered with TODOs like this https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30412/changes#diff-6c2b5...
Anecdotally, I am seeing tons of visual bugs in software and apps these days.
Issues of rendering, too many menu options, mobile sizes not being accounted for per se, non-functioning buttons, half-load issues, etc. Consumer facing, major platforms, commercial services.
I can’t ascribe all of it to LLMs but there’s been an objective change in my impotent cursing from “what is wrong with them” to “did anyone even test this?” over the last six months to a year. If the backends start acting like these frontends we might get to see a bunch of cognitive/technical debt blow up at scale.
100% agree on this. Even just the flashing on nav menus. Very very common to load an app I'm already signed in to, see the "login / signup" state first, then a loading indicator or skeleton, then the logged in state. Just seems like amateur hour all over the place of people or companies not caring.
> My hot take is Anthropic is going to have a really rough year as they’re going to start to feel the weight of all their vibe coding and products.
sed -e 's/Anthropic/everyone/g' and I agree.
"move things and break fast" all around.
Given how terrible their in-house support bot is, I don't think they've figured out jack shit. If you truly had a half-decent LLM, you'd think the first place you'd put it to demonstrate the capabilities is handling support.
The PR was closed because it did it too soon.
Does anybody know what model they are using? Is that Mythos?
This is impressive. I honestly don't know what to think about programming careers, need to reflect on my role in this area. The only thing that comes to mind the that quote from Cypher (Matrix):
"Buckle your seat belt, Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye-bye."
> This PR has been marked as AI slop and the description has been updated to avoid confusion or misleading reviewers
deleted
Yeah the next generation is understanding the codebase vs understanding how to prompt the info out of the codebase. I too took on the rust port of a working software, learned some LLM roadbumps, and it looks very much like the future is LLM coded and human "managed"
They are already hiring for (experienced) Rust and C++ developers to clean up the slop that used Claude to create.
But then again, this is all marketing content for Anthropic for large scale production-grade rewrites such as this.
It might be the time to flag Bun as AI slop
Regardless of your optimism about LLMs, it seems crazy to expect an entire runtime to be stable after this kind of refactoring pass. I would be skeptical if humans did it too. Rust isn’t magical; it can still compile with bugs despite what some people claim.
its always been slop though, even before the AI
[dead]