It's kind of strange to not engage with any of the points made in the article. Unlike you, I don't think the post makes them look childish at all. I think it raises a lot of valid points and makes me want to use Zig more.

How is it unprofessional when it is simply someone giving their honest personal opinion on an issue that involves something that is valuable to them, on their personal blog nonetheless.

Is everyone a walking and talking brand now so that they have to always filter their words, walk on eggshells, hide behind corpo-speak so as to seem 'professional'?

More honest discourse is required in today's world, not less. It seems interactions online are becoming less and less authentic.

> This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product

The article seems to be happy about the switch to Rust, that point is re-iterated multiple times in the article, and seemingly they were both awaiting Bun moving away from Zig and wishing for it.

> This is unprofessional and embarrassing for Zig.

It is. It's also why Anthropic and Bun moved off Zig.

Zig is effectively a one-man show, and that one man has been making increasingly erratic decisions.

It's his project so it's well within his rights, of course. But when you're a ~trillion dollar company you don't want to get hit by a supply chain risk like this.

For Anthropic, it's better to nip this in the bud rather than invest more into the Zig ecosystem, where there's a demonstrated risk of the not-so-BDFL going off the rails.

> It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig when it really just makes them look childish.

Antirez made a post equivalent to: you'd be a fool not to use AI to increase test coverage.

Zig on the other hand has embarrassingly low test coverage given its adoption and time in development.

Their stance on AI is completely childish. They could benefit massively from it, yet refuse to even consider any potential usage.

It's one thing to try to stop PR spam. It's another thing to tie your hands behind your back and not even use it internally for the lowest hanging fruit where it could have major benefits.

They could use AI to triage potential real bugs from PR spam... but instead they just let real bugs go unnoticed for longer than need be because they won't even use AI to help triage...

No, it's embarrassing being obsessed with good tone to the point that people behaving badly should never be called out for it.

The article provides good background into how it got to this point - and it fits well with doing an opportunistic AI rewrite after being acquired by an AI provider.

> I now learn he's donated significant chunks of money to them.

Biting the hand that feeds you might make you an asshole. But sometimes you have to be an asshole to uphold standards and principles. I don't think Linus or Jobs would be known to produce such important technology if they don't care enough about their works to act crudely to people they consider substandard.

We can disagree with Andrew's standards of course. But saying he should not attack someone just because he took money from him is a weak criticism.

Agreed. This article should have stuck to the cold facts, rather than a series of personal criticisms that you wouldn’t see written out in the workplace.

Sadly there are far too many open source developers out there who are far too comfortable writing like this. It’s one reason I have stopped being active in open source. You would be fired (or at least disciplined) from any reasonable workplace if you acted like this.

"An unprofessional embarrassment" is exactly how I feel about Bun.

I don't get mad at people for standing up for their morals, I get mad when they have none. AI is an a-moral tech, and Bun is using it in an a-moral way: for team Bun the ends justify any means.

I'm on team Zig!

I don't think it's too bad, but I also don't think it's good.

I also don't think Andrew can claim at the end "I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred" when the post includes the sentence "Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs".

> It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig

I'm not sure that's his aim here. I imagine he has been asked dozens of times what he thinks about the switch, what it means for Zig, etc. etc. and wanted to just address it one time, which is understandable.

The tone is... strong. I think repeating grapevine rumours about Jarred's management skills adds very little and probably could have been removed. But at its heart I see this post as example of a common clash: open source code hackers vs Silicon Valley "growth hackers".

Kelley is disappointed that a promising Zig project took VC money and went from his passion project's prime example to one that shit talked it on the way out. I get why he's emotional. I wouldn't have written it the way he did but I also don't think policing tone is beneficial for honest communication.

I don't think it's an attack, more like a goodbye.

Andrew is happy bun is not zig anymore because it was not up to the level they would expect from a project that represents them.

I don't think he is attacking, he's just organising his thoughts publicly.

how is it attacking him for using a different product? except for compile times nothing here even indicates that rust would be a bad choice for bun

I almost completely disagree.

Unprofessional? Maybe a little, but honest, and while the truth isn't flattering to Jarred, I'd say generally kind.

Embarrassing? Not from my seat. Andrew is just revealing the relationship dynamics between a principled programming language developers and pragmatic business users of that language.

I had already inferred a bunch that this post confirms based on the agentic port from forked-Zig to Rust. It's very nice to have suspicions confirmed.

I think he also wants to attack Anthropic by proxy.

Before the post I didn't know what zig and bun is. I needed a llm to explain it to me. Now I think about trying Zig. So, no, I don't think it's childish. It reads like a engineer that knows which kind of people you don't need in your environment. I can feel every word he wrote because I know this situations.

> This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product.

Well, TFA has a conveniently titled section "Addressing the Blog Post", that raises (setting aside speculation) some good points:

  The [Bun rewrite] blog post is ... almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article ...
  
  There's a dichotomy being presented here where you have to either choose a "style guide" or a programming language feature in order to avoid bugs. The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it ...
  
  [TigerBeetle] put in the time to find and eliminate the bugs, they make an effort to maintain a healthy relationship with ZSF, and Bun did not do that.

  The argument for shipping all the million lines of unreviewed code is that the test suite is good enough to catch everything. Then why are you saying you have so many annoying bugs in the Zig code? What happened to the test suite being sufficient to catch everything ...

  Performance increase is attributed to LTO, which Zig has supported for all of Bun's existence. It used to be enabled by default until we ran into too many LLVM bugs, all of which also affect Rust ...

  The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.

  The blog post outlines a bunch of engineering work done to reduce binary size, to better make the case that "Bun is better in Rust" ... you were doing the engineering work that you should have done in the Zig codebase since the beginning ...

  I noticed that you neglected to mention compilation speed. Zig compiler project is about 600,000 lines of code - roughly the same size as Bun before the rewrite, and I'm clocking 16s to build from scratch with a clean cache, followed by 90ms for each subsequent edit with incremental compilation enabled. What are the corresponding measurements of Bun post-rewrite?

> Or maybe he doesn't care, and just wants to attack Jarred?

I've worked with ark enough that I think I've started to learn his default style, or at the very least to know that from him; this isn't an attack. If that was your read, I think you're taking more from sources that aren't this post.

I wonder if you're confusing statements of fact, for attacks? They're distinct, and the context for the post. I'm sure he's been asked a few, hundred, times what's his take on this decision made by this single person.

> Two, I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred. He has different taste than me, he wants different things out of life than me. [...] Honestly, I think he did well for himself, and I don't wish him any ill will.

> That said I'm happy that our business interests are no longer intertwined! As soon as the Internet stops arguing in public about whether the rewrite was good or bad for Bun based on the language choice, I believe that concludes our interactions.

Translation, Jarred posted his thing, so now Andrew "has" to post his thing: hopefully so the internet will stop asking, and he can ignore this shit he doesn't care about, and people will leave him alone long enough that he can get back to spending his attention on his language, which is all he really wants.

Totally agree. This article really turned me off of ever using Zig for a project.

> This is unprofessional and embarrassing for Zig

This isn’t like the official stance of the zig foundation or anything. I for one am happy to see people being honest about their frustrations instead of playing politics.

I agree and I’m confused that some other commenters aren’t seeing it.

> The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.

> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.

This isn’t about wanting “sanitized corpo-speak” or something, but I do expect leads of projects to behave like adults and not build arguments on ad-hominem attacks and rumors they supposedly heard.

Address the topic and put forth some arguments. I don’t care to hear your personal beef with someone aired publicly.