Rewrites are normal.
I'm rewriting my compiler from OCaml to Go. Hell, Roc rewrote their Rust based compiler to Zig, and no one said anything against them, as they did it carefully.
What Bun devs are being criticized for, is losing public trust, due to abrupt decisions.
It isn't unexpected that the focus of the Bun Rust rewrite is on the anti-Zig side more than anything, since the internet loves to hate. What is unexpected and unfortunate is that leadership within Bun hasn't tried to steer the conversation away from that at all.
There are so many positive and interesting takeaways from this and I'm not really seeing any of them pushed as the primary message.
A positive thing that hasn't been talked about at all is how far Bun came thanks to Zig. And even if you dump it now, its meaningful for how good Zig was to even build a product to this point and impact by any metric. I would've loved to see anyone in leadership say this.
On the interesting side is how fungible programming languages are nowadays. Programming languages used to be LOCK IN, and they're increasingly not so. You think the Bun rewrite in Rust is good for Rust? Bun has shown they can be in probably any language they want in roughly a week or two. Rust is expendable. Its useful until its not then it can be thrown out. That's interesting!
There's been a lot of talk about memory safety and no doubt Rust provides more guarantees than Zig. But I'd love to see a better analysis of why Bun in particular suffered so much rather than take the language-blame path. How could engineering as a practice been more rigorous to prevent this? What were the largest sources of crashes other programs should watch out for? How does Rust prevent them? How could Zig theoretically prevent them? That's interesting.
I know the official blog post hasn't come out yet from Bun. But they're smart enough to know that that PR would stir up controversy the moment it opened, or they should've been. And plenty in the company have been tweeting and writing about it. Its somewhat telling to me in various dimensions what they chose to talk about first.
I tend to think I'm pretty good at corporate PR/comms (especially when it comes to developer audiences) and I think appealing to the negative is never the right long term strategy; it does work to get short term eyes though.
Why do Americans act like they're surprised Xi would say this? The idea that China and the US should get along instead of having conflicts has literally been said for decades. You guys just never listen and always use your hostile mindset to assume.
it's a complete million-line rewrite of a multi-year project done in 6 days by a clanker (and not the smart one out of the two coding clankers)
it was merged because "it passes tests"
no one reviewed the million lines of code in 6 days
and the lead maintainer by his own admission did not care about it
you're goddamn right I think it's hype
Two official images tell the story.
In Beijing, Trump walks beside Xi on the red carpet.
At the White House, Trump walks Japan’s prime minister Sanae Takaichi in with his hand on her back.
One image says: power beside power.
The other says: submissive imperial mistress.
The camera understood the hierarchy before the politicians admitted it.
China hasn't fought a war in over 40 years, yet it's still grown into one of the world's largest economy and most influential countries - that's what a superpower is.