Bun 1.4 Rust rewrite is not looking good
Bun's creator Jarred Sumner has been promising the 1.4 release 'tomorrow' for weeks, but the stable version is now three months late. The Rust rewrite, which was supposed to fix memory safety issues, is instead generating massive numbers of AI-authored commits and open pull requests, leading to community frustration and concerns about code quality.
We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun’s codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. Abuse of assertions. Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.
- aypineau
I'm really skeptical about this rewrite
I chose to adopt bun about a year ago, and I've honestly lost count of the number of issues i've submitted and the amount of time i've wasted dealing with them. If I had to make the choice again, I would probably stick with node and pnpm for serious projects
We're constantly being sold on promises of -XX% ram usage, but in practice, it's often builds randomly failing for no apparent reason, memory leaks bringing applications down, and instability that ends up costing far more in engineering time than the resources saved
That's why i'm worried that bun 1.4 could end up being a step backwards, once again putting into question the small amount of stability we've managed to achieve so far
But I still strongly believe the project makes a lot of sense, and I genuinely think these issues can be solved by 2028, if the project keeps its focus on stability instead of another SDK for SQL, web sockets, image compression, or whatever comes next
- skeledrew
I'm still waiting for someone to bring forth some reproducible stats and state something along the lines of "I did a comparison of Bun 1.3 vs 1.4, and found these user-affecting issues in the latter which are not in the former".
- joshuat
This reads as another weirdly personal attack against Jarred for slighting a technology stack the author prefers, citing the even weirder personal attack against Jarred written by Andrew Kelley as the sole source to justify their "biggest worry", code quality.
Idk why people have become so invested in this.
- dvt
> The last three months have not looked good for Bun.
Apart from pro-AI or anti-AI posturing how have the last few months not looked good for Bun, exactly? I use it daily and I've seen basically zero regressions. I get it, you don't like AI or you like Zig over Rust, or whatever. I just haven't seen any serious argument that Bun has somehow become worse software.
> The project has over 5k open pull requests, which is the largest number of pull requests I’ve seen.
Terrible argument, and not really an argument at all.
> The biggest worry is, of course, the code itself.
I agree, so look at the code and point out what's wrong with it.
Insofar as Andrew Kelley is concerned, it's obvious he has an axe to grind and is salty about Bun embarassing Zig (which he freely admits). Not sure why you'd invoke an unreliable narrator as some sort of final nail in the coffin.
- rich_sasha
For me the real test will be maintainability going forwards. Not a JS user.
I suppose it’s one thing to rewrite code and make tests pass. But a lot of my own CPU cycles when coding go to making the code understandable, modular, editable etc. IME Claude is not great on these.
Maybe it doesn’t matter? Maybe the spaghetti makes sense to Claude, and when you say “hey add this feature”, no problem?
But maybe it will turn into a worse ball of spaghetti, with no nicely curated tests, hacks on hacks on hacks and never ending loops of whackamole of “just change this one line and rerun tests”.
I can imagine both - let’s see.
- classicposter
https://x.com/yagiznizipli/status/2082905235459117202
They were pleased to be faster than Go in the "Hello World" benchmark, but unfortunately, they lag behind Node.js and Deno in complex real-world workloads.
- rtpg
3 months since the last stable release feels ... alright. The constant promises for a new stable release feels a bit like a self-own.
Having said that I would have a bit more confidence in things if release just got back to a normal pace.
- jtrn
This reads like one of thouse articles in mainstream media where the author has a obvious agenda, and they think they are really clever when they write an attack piece that they think looks like objective , when it really really transparently isent.