grep -nr 'unsafe' . Is all you need to know to consider how much of an abomination it is

alexandra_au • last Sunday at 11:41 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

grep -nr 'unsafe' .

Is all you need to know to consider how much of an abomination it is

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This comment inspired me to take a look at the trend of "unsafe" in the Bun code over time since the rewrite PR first landed - here are the commits where that number changed by at least 10:

  2026-05-14 23427db 13907
  2026-05-14 19d8ade 13861
  2026-05-15 4d443e5 13840
  2026-05-17 172afa5 13803
  2026-05-17 80a06a8 13849
  2026-05-18 fba43af 14026
  2026-05-19 303cd28 14052
  2026-05-20 21db682 14243
  2026-05-22 a06a00a 14239
  2026-05-23 49c97de 14090
  2026-05-28 472a06a 14076
  2026-06-01 a0d1472 14071
  2026-06-04 8553428 14032
  2026-06-09 717542f 14053
  2026-06-10 1c90e5a 14043
  2026-06-11 6e91d24 14031
  2026-06-16 bd8edc7 14086
  2026-06-17 6ef5977 14104
  2026-06-20 315ed50 14106
  2026-06-22 c6be834 14120
  2026-06-23 ea7e44f 14108
  2026-06-23 03042ab 14128
  2026-06-29 86d32c8 14046
  2026-07-01 6640fcf 14077
  2026-07-04 51074e3 14099
  2026-07-06 9d0e93d 14186
  2026-07-08 ab6eb2d 13953
  2026-07-09 86caf6e 13936
  2026-07-10 91675d0 13930
  2026-07-13 73b6c14 13951
  2026-07-16 4bbe075 13978
  2026-07-16 57e30a5 13995

So not as much cleanup as I had expected!

ChatGPT written script for counting here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/b1015bcadcedd1a781cedb7af9cbb...

rwz • last Sunday at 12:47 PM

The original code was one giant unsafe block with almost no tangible way to find or debug all the subtle memory bugs and leaks they had.

Now it's smaller, faster and has fewer bugs. Also its every potential memory issue is neatly annotated by an unsafe block so you can go and refactor them out one by one with confidence.

All this seems like a pretty huge improvement to me. Why is this an abomination in your eyes?

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