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Bun has been acquired by Anthropic (bun.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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Biggest WTF news I've read today. I'm not a web dev so this doesn't affect me, but this is bizarre.

We get a closer first look at what's around the corner for AI coding tools, and make Bun better for it

This incredibly popular tool is now going to merge with an AI company and shift gears to be turned into some forced AI hype machine. Yipee! Exactly what all the devs were hoping for! /s

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[–] 15 points 9 months ago (2 children)

It's not a bad outcome. Bun is cool but has $0 revenue and some hand-wavy thing about future paid cloud services. This way, larger companies will give them a more serious shot than they would a small startup.

It still doesn't have a revenue story, but it's now strapped onto the side of one of the few AI companies with a decent chance of surviving the next AI Winter. And if Anthropic goes sideways, the Bun engineers can fork the code and keep going.

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Why does Anthropic think they need a JS runtime though? Are they just like "well Microsoft has a command line tool for installing JS packages so we need one too"???

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    On the AI coding IDE side, VSCode has pretty much hoovered up everyone, mainly because JetBrains offered their own AI option, which kept competitors away. On the server side, though, integrating with AI is still wide open.

    You eventually have to hit Python because of all the ML libraries. But you can run that as a separate microservice or process. Here's a chance to do something whacky, like let JS invoke Python-ML inline, or port the main ML libraries to JS, or cross-compile JS to CUDA (just spit-balling here). It'll be a lot easier to try these experiments than trying to push it upstream into Node.

    Plus, Bun is used by a bunch of cross-platform CLI tools, including Claude Code, so they can make sure there are no breaking changes.

    TBH, I'm surprised nobody's snapped up Mojo (and Chris Lattner). They have a lot more advanced, AI-relevant, cross-platform tech.

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