It is a pity that you can't make an experimental commit on an experimental branch without igniting a fire of delirium through some people who -- if they were able to put their emotional response aside for a minute and could weigh this up on the basis of merit -- would probably agree with the motivations for researching this approach.
> if/how hard it’d be to get it to pass Bun’s test suite and be maintainable
Every month brings new opportunities to completely abstract the process of porting code with agents, all using linguistics. What an exciting time.
For those looking for a similarly interesting (and interestingly similar) example, see Cloudflare's port of Next.js[0], "vinext", from a couple of months ago. It had some teething problems at the start but I'm using it in a few production projects now with minimal issues.
This is what it means to work on a popular project, unfortunately.
I am a topic starter, and I had no emotional response, was just being curious. Never expected it will land at HN #1. I specifically posted the link to the first commit and not to the whole branch, because currently the prompt is the most interesting part.
The title kinda set the tone for this post.
The title is "Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust". The docs/PORTING.MD starts with "Zig → Rust porting guide"
I don't think the tone was the problem.
Imaging title it "Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust in an experimental branch" though. Not enough drama with that
The branch name is "claude/phase-a-port", there was zero indication this was an experiment until Jarred commented. The more accurate title might have simply been "there is a branch in the official repo of bun describing a port to rust from zig". No amount of soft titles would have prevented the discussion. People have their opinions about Bun, about Zig, about Rust and it's all going to come out in a discussion board.
> there was zero indication this was an experiment
I mean, it would be hard to spell it out any clearer than that! Code that fails to compile is just not very useful for real work.I couldn't use that title because I didn't know if it an experiment at the moment. Even now the correct title would be "Bun author says that he is entertaining the idea of porting it from Zig to Rust, creates an experimental branch".
But you also didn't know a port was happening, which the title implies.
That's not a very constructive, nor accurate, way of trying to dismiss all concerns around bun that has been raised.
I think that was a very constructive comment about the unconstructive way people are shoe-horning other concerns about bun into this thread abut a specific aspect which itself turns out to be just an experiment that someone knee-jerk reacted to, despite several active threads already discussing those matters one of which only just fell off the front page.
While the concerns many have about Bun's potential future direction are valid IMO, of the posts on this thread the one you are criticising is one of the more constructive.