Bun was originally written in Zig. It was one of the Zig language’s flagship projects that was brought up everywhere as an example of a successful Zig project, alongside Tiger Beetle and Ghostty.
The Bun team did an experiment to have an LLM transliterate the codebase to Rust and then iterate on turning it into idiomatic Rust. They were losing a lot of time dealing with memory management problems and wanted to move to a language with more memory safety built in rather than Zig’s very manual cleanup, which is challenging in a project like Bun that is dealing with running another language.
The Bun team posted a small blog post about the migration with technical details about how they’re doing it, along with some thanks to the Zig team and positive notes about Zig. The Zig language creator posted a blog post where he ranted about the Bun creator writing “slop before LLMs” and being a “stinky manager” according to “juicy grapes” he heard through the grapevine and numerous other attacks. It was an emotionally charged response to one of the language’s flagship projects leaving for another language.
This split the community, or at least became divisive for a lot of people who have no interest in Bun but view the fight as a proxy for some other battle like hating LLMs or Rust.
It didn’t actually kill the project. The team was acquired by Anthropic and it (the Rust version) is being used in their products, so it’s actually running everywhere and doing more than ever. There was a poll on some subreddit that showed only 30% of people were going to keep using it after the rewrite and people keep holding this up as evidence that the project is dead.
We are taught that schooling level is related to intelligence, then we internalise that concept, then we make silly assumptions based on that concept.
Plenty of highly intelligent people don't get educated because they see through the farce, or they decide that being submissive to the system is bad, or they test poorly (e.g. dyslexic), or their intelligence has found better opportunities.
Higher education does not make you more intelligent. Nor is it a good filter/measure of intelligence. Too many people chase it for status.
I always remember one very smart lady skiting to me about aiming for B grades and manipulating lecturers since she only needed a degree to pass HR requirements. I wasn't that smart.
I try to understand my successful friends that left school at 15. Unfortunately that is a biased sample of people without higher education: they are very intelligent, effective and hard-working.
I am not aware of studies, but my experience agrees with this and I see nothing surprising in it.
In the schools in which I was, the best results were obtained by the students who were intelligent, but not too intelligent, because they were able to accomplish easily whatever was requested from them by the teachers and they were content with that, so they had good relationships with all teachers, resulting in uniformly good grades.
The students who were more intelligent than that, had difficulties, because they were frequently better than the teachers. Few teachers were OK with that, especially when the better students were unable to restrain themselves to not point at mistakes done by the teachers. Even when they avoided conflicts with the teachers about what is right and wrong, the better students were bored by what they were taught and they were reluctant to do various kinds of homework that seemed pointless for them. So they usually did not have good relationships with most teachers, with the exception of a few teachers, who either were very good themselves or they appreciated better talent when they saw it. So the best students had excellent grades only at one subject or two, with low grades at many others, so they ended only with average grades.
I dropped out as soon as I could, I have ADD and school was the most excruciatingly painful thing I've ever experienced mentally. It felt like my entire life purpose was about waiting for it to finally end.
I enjoyed discovering new things and learning stuff that genuinely was interesting to me. Howeverlearning what a "big rock" symbol was in a map in geography class was the kind of stuff that made me want to chew my own arm for stimulation.
Plus not to mention having to accept wrong things as right because the teacher lacks the information and is just reading off a book.
I never did homework, except for a handful of times.
I spent my time programming and learning about industry stuff in the tech scene.
And I love working, because you're actually like building towards something, not just "trust me, this'll be valuable later on" (which my brain can't interpret as a motivator)
I envy those that get excited about acquiring credentials and getting formally educated about this and that, it's a way easier way to live in this world.
A post like this hitting the HN front page feels like a monthly occurrence. Normally I think of commenting in your support but never post it.
While I agree with your technical points, the constant criticism seems less about the specifics and more rooted in either a tendency to go after the incredibly successful, or classic tall poppy syndrome [0].
While we can't control how others react, reframing these kinds of posts as an indirect acknowledgment of your work's significance might be a healthier approach.
Those were actual benchmarks that we run, we didn't get a chance to write them out properly before posting. I'll get on it now and notify by replying to this comment when they're on the readme :)
Python is really great for quickly developing applications.
However, maintaining them is a real pain point—especially when it comes to packages and their dependencies.
Furthermore, because there isn’t a compile-time checker, function or method signatures can change unnoticed. Compilers are great for catching such issues at compile time rather than at runtime. Python does have mypy, which can play that role, but the package must support it. Currently, you are dependent on the package maintainer regarding their adherence to semver.
Maybe this project will be able to fill that hole.
I'm working on a small project for managing settings in Golang.
I found that boilerplate code needed for handling defaults, environment variables, and CLI variables could become unreasonably large and error prone. I just wanted to have a struct hold the settings needed for the project, with sane defaults, helpful messages, and handling of environment and CLI variables at the same time.
So I created Settingo.
Settingo is a unified solution to handle defaults, environment variables, and CLI arguments. Settings are a boring aspect of a project, and Settingo will allow a dev to focus on the project.
https://github.com/Attumm/settingo
