alt Hacker NewsAnthropic acquires Bun
Comments
Bun has completely changed my outlook on the JS ecosystem. Prior to Bun, there was little focus on performance. Now the entire space rallies around it.
Congrats to Jarred and the team!
This announcement made me check in on the arbitrary code execution bug I reported that the Bun Claude bot created a PR for about 3 weeks ago:
https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/24578
So far, someone from the bun team has left a bunch of comments like
> Poor quality code
...and all the tests still seem to be failing. I looked through the code that the bot had generated and to me (who to be fair is not familiar with the bun codebase) it looks like total dogshit.
But hey, maybe it'll get there eventually. I don't envy "taylordotfish" and the other bot-herders working at Oven though, and I hope they get a nice payout as part of this sale.
A single bun? Is that really newsworthy?
This wasn’t very high up on my list for acquisitions but props to the bun team for cashing in on the AI hype somehow!
Congratulations to Jared. He and the team are Real Ziggers. Looking forward to a faster Claude Code!
Makes sense, I had idea how else the investors would have made money on a javascript bundler/jsc frontend
Congrats Jarred and team! You have saved humanity many hours already, and I'm sure with Anthropic's backing, you will spare us many more. Farewell would-be headaches from Node & NPM tooling and waiting for builds and tests and package updates. Exciting times ahead!
Using bun on a side project reinvigorated my love of software development during a relatively dark time in my life, and part of me wonders if I would have taken the leap onto my current path if it weren't for the joy and feeling of speed that came from working with bun!
Curious, how did he pay the bills when spending these years developing Bun?
No strategic roadmap is ever going to tell you: "Build a $0-revenue JavaScript runtime and one day an AI company will acquire you"
My long-term bet on Node being "boring" and "stable" continues to pay major dividends. So glad I never invested any time and effort on this ecosystem…
Who is expects Anthropic to migrate all their code to Codeberg.
:(
oh well. it was cool while it lasted! I guess I'll figure out how to make deno do what I want, now.
Shouts out to the fellow who half-broke the news in this submission that was presumably killed because of the aggressive paywall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46123627
And apparently the submission's source for being the only org I can tell that anticipated this: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-advanced-t...
Interesting. Looking through a strategic lens, I feel like this is related to the $1,000 free credit for Claude Code Web (I used a few hundred). What the heck are they aiming for? CodeAct? (https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01030)
Well, Bun is MIT-licensed. So once they change the license and/or kill the project, the community can fork it easily.
In other news - Amp Code is a separate company now - https://ampcode.com/news/amp-inc
What a trip. Love both, so all good I guess.
Incredible news on so, so many levels!
(1) Bun is what technical startups should be. Consistently excellent decisions, hyper focused on user experience, and a truly excellent technical product.
(2) We live in a world where TUIs are causing billion dollar acquisitions. Think about that. Obviously, Bun itself is largely orthogonal to the TUIs. Just another use case. But also obviously, they wouldn't have been acquired like this without this use case.
(3) There's been questions of whether startups like Bun can exist. How will they make money? When will they have to sell out one of the three principles in (1) to do so? The answer seems to be that they don't; at least, not like we expected, and in my opinion not in a sinister way.
A sinister or corrupting sell out would be e.g. like Conan. What started as an excellent tool became a bloated, versioned mess as they were forced to implement features to support the corporate customers that sustained them.
This feels different. Of course, there will be some selling out. But largely the interests of Anthropic seem aligned with "build the best JS runtime", since Anthropic themselves must be laser focused on user experience with Claude Code. And just look at Opencode [^1] if you want to see what leaning all the way into Bun gets you. Single file binary distribution, absurdly fast, gorgeous. Their backend, OpenTUI [^2], is a large part of this, and was built in close correspondence with the Bun folks. It's not something that could exist without Bun, in my opinion.
(4) Anthropic could have certainly let Bun be a third party to which they contributed. They did not have to purchase them. But they did. There is a strange not-quite altruism in this; at worst, a casting off of the exploitation of open source we often see from the biggest companies. Things change; what seems almost altruistic now could be revealed to be sinister, or could morph into such. But for now, at least, it feels good and right.
[^1]: https://github.com/sst/opencode [^2]: https://github.com/sst/opentui
Can anyone provide some color around this: "I started porting esbuild's JSX & TypeScript transpiler from Go to Zig"? Hypothetical benefits include monolanguage for development, better interoperability with C and C++, no garbage collection, and better performance. What turned out to be realized and relevant here? Please, no speculation or language flames or wars.
It makes total sense to me.
Why the hell is a CLI coding agent built in JavaScript?
It’s wild what happens when a generation of programmers doesn’t know anything except webdev. How far from grace we have fallen.
Hahaha congratulations. This is amazing. The most unlikely outcome for a devtools team. Fascinating stuff.
This is promising for Astral et al who I really like but worried about their sustainability. It does point to being as close to the user as possible mattering.
The Bun team works hard, glad to see it pay off.
wow !
video covering it
Is Claude Code the first CLI tool to have a $1BN ARR?
Associated Anthropic post: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-acquires-bun-as-cla...
Love bun! Congratulations!
Good luck, always worried about stuff like that because it happened so many times and the product got worse eventually. At the same time, ai understand how much effort went into building something like Bun and people need to fund their life's somehow, so there's that.
> If Bun breaks, Claude Code breaks. Anthropic has direct incentive to keep Bun excellent.
and when this bubble pops down goes bun
Reminds me of Atlassian buying an AI browser.
First major success story for Zig language? (Not trying to diminish Bun's team success)
Congrats. This is the first time I remember reading a genuine, authentic story about a sale. Much preferred over “this is about continuing the mission until my earn-out is complete.”
Congrats...
> Long-term stability. a home and resources so people can safely bet their stack on Bun.
Isn't it the opposite? Now we've tied Bun to "AI" and if the AI bubble or hype or whatever bursts or dies down it'd impact Bun.
> We had over 4 years of runway to figure out monetization. We didn't have to join Anthropic.
There's honestly a higher chance of Bun sticking out that runway than the current AI hype still being around.
Nothing against Anthropic but with the circular financing, all the debt, OpenAI's spending and over-valuations "AI" is the riskier bet than Bun and hosting.
Well this just created a lot of work for me. Everything’s turning to shit at an alarming rate.
Hahahahahhaahhahahahahahhahahahahahhahahaha.
Regards.
Not to be confused with Bunn [1], the coffee maker makers.
[1] www.bunn.com
What?
Why?
Classic - brand new blog post:
> We’re hiring engineers.
Careers page:
> Sorry, no job openings at the moment.
[dead]
[flagged]
deno won, rust won
anthropic wont win, and will just get bought out by an ibm or oracle in the end...time to migrate from bun now
I use bun in a project but Claude Code always uses node to run throwaway scripts. Maybe they can persuade it to use bun as part of this acquisition?