I don't really understand the point of this. Is it Anthropic showing off well their LLMs work? Was it too difficult to find Zig devs so Bun swapped to Rust? Did Jarred read one too many memes about "rewriting in rust" and took it at face value??
I would imagine that there will be bugs migrating all at once, performance will probably be close to the same, and the maintainers will need to context shift from Zig to Rust. A very confusing decision for sure.
Claude is significantly better at rust than zig. Zig is changing all the time. If you check my profile comments I did a quick experiment recently to demonstrate. Essentially, Claude could generate a basic working tcp echo server in a few seconds. For zig, either asking it to do it just with zig, or with specific versions (.15 and .16 because some fundamental language changes necessitate different implementations) failed to produce working code in all three cases and also took magnitudes longer to generate the code.
Aside from the big marketing play, Claude not being able to easily generate zig code was probably a big motivator - it doesn’t make anthropic look good and it doesn’t fit into how they’re doing things
Also, you’re assuming that actual traditional maintainers even exist now. Likely it’s a smaller team of people running mythos agents with an unlimited budget and no real need to fully understand the code
I suspect one part of the puzzle is that Bun used its own fork of Zig, that had diverged signficantly in design and direction from mainline Zig.
The point of it is to hype anthropics IPO.
Probably some combination of: Anthropic is heavily invested in the Rust ecosystem and they want their core tools to be built on Rust. More Rust developers. More Rust training data so LLMs write better Rust code than Zig code. Advertisement for Claude Code doing major work on a high profile open source project.