87
Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
(raymyers.org)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
87 points (96.8% liked)
Programming
27709 readers
359 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
It depends on where exactly that 5% lies. If it's in the core API that's used by the rest of the architecture, it essentially makes the whole codebase unsafe when used irresponsibly.
I don't know if that's the case here, just pointing out that the 5% doesn't mean much.
Not exactly. It means that any of the code could lead to memory unsafety, but it's still better than Zig or C because you still only have to read 5% of the code to debug/fix those issues, instead of 100%.
5% is clearly better than 100%. Whatever else you think about this port you can't argue against that. In fact I can prove that it's better.
Does Rust's memory safety design improve memory safety? Yes, this is proven by experience (e.g. see Google's blog posts).
Does "normal" (not slop) Rust code rely on some
unsafe? Yes. All Rust code must use someunsafebecause it's used in the standard library, and even if you ignore that (there is an effort led by Amazon to formally verify it), it's usual for Rust projects to use at least someunsafe. Let's say 0.1% of lines.So 0.1% unsafe is clearly better than 100%. Is it possible for 0.1% unsafe to be better than 100%, but somehow 5% isn't? That would require things to be non-monotonic which is completely implausible.
I'm sorry, but since we're being pedantic, this is not a proof. It's full of assumptions, some of which are wrong.
Never denied it. 0% is even better. What matters is where it's used. If it's used for FFI, that's understandable. Any other use should be scrutinized more. And that's the issue. The claim of Zig's creator is that the devs of Bun are not reliable. And to me at least, his arguments make sense.
Doesn't seem like it. This article claims that only about 20% of Rust crates use
unsafeat all. Even among those, the vast majority use it for FFI, which is kinda unavoidable.Again, no one claimed that. But we need more than "better than 100%" when it's a JS runtime. And the "better"ness isn't necessarily linear. So, even though it might be technically "better", it might not be by much. At that point, what even is the point of the rewrite?
Again, I'm not claiming that it's actually badly written. I'm only claiming that your arguments are not adequate, and that Bun is not a reliable company, so take whatever they claim with a grain of salt.