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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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[-] ptz@dubvee.org 129 points 2 months ago

Oh goddamn it. I just started doing projects in Bun and moving some of my older projects to it.

Fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck.

[-] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 2 months ago
[-] ptz@dubvee.org 5 points 2 months ago

Yeah. I'm going to keep using it for now but definitely going back and un-reimplementing some things that I moved into the Bun API. Basically just gonna use it as a runtime in place of NodeJS.

I just really liked being able to build and distribute a single binary executable :(

[-] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 months ago

I would say it should be forked but no one knows Zig haha.

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[-] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 84 points 2 months ago

Looks like it's MIT-licensed, so it's probably time to make a non-Anthropic fork.

[-] justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io 57 points 2 months ago

Not overly surprising.

Google and Salesforce have been "developing" new features and products this way for at least the last 13 years?

  1. Find promising small business/startup
  2. Buy it with your war chest money
  3. Force them to integrate with your systems and live inside your walled garden.
[-] somerandomperson@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 2 months ago

I'm not a business expert, so i want to ask:
Can you "reject" being bought?

[-] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 29 points 2 months ago

Amazon.com acquired parent Quidsi, Inc. for $545 million on November 8, 2010. Prior to Amazon's purchase, Amazon sold diapers at steep losses in order to undercut Diapers.com and drive down the purchase price of the company.

No. Not if they really want to buy you.

Source

[-] justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io 12 points 2 months ago

The whole Amazon diapers is insane.
The burgeoning monopoly was being noticed as early as 2011. I know this because it is why the CEO of one chain here planned out and started offering grocery deliveries.

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[-] mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 16 points 2 months ago

yes, so long as you don't them putting pressure on your suppliers and helping your competitors, I guess

[-] nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 2 months ago

Or just building a straight close of your idea and crushing you. Happened to my startup.

[-] GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 months ago

Getting bought is often the whole point for a founder, since that's one of a few ways for you to get a big payday.

Getting bought only really happens if a majority of the shareholders agree to it, so you can reject it as much as you want.

[-] jonathan@piefed.social 6 points 2 months ago

It depends on how much of the company you gave away when you took on investment. If you no longer have the controlling share you can be overruled.

[-] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 months ago

Yes but... not really.

If you're amazingly talented and spend 10 years of your life building something amazing but have no money, when someone offers you millions you're just gonna take it.

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[-] paequ2@lemmy.today 45 points 2 months ago

I started using Claude Code myself. I got kind of obsessed with it.

Over the last several months, the GitHub username with the most merged PRs in Bun's repo is now a Claude Code bot. We have it set up in our internal Discord and we mostly use it to help fix bugs. It opens PRs with tests that fail in the earlier system-installed version of Bun before the fix and pass in the fixed debug build of Bun. It responds to review comments. It does the whole thing.

Seems like they've bought into the hype.

[-] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 2 months ago
[-] Zikeji@programming.dev 31 points 2 months ago

:(

Time to switch to yarn or something.

[-] bjorney@lemmy.ca 28 points 2 months ago
[-] Zikeji@programming.dev 10 points 2 months ago

Sure, which makes the transition suck even lol.

[-] naught@sh.itjust.works 11 points 2 months ago
[-] lena@gregtech.eu 6 points 2 months ago

Hey, Deno is really good (for JS standards)

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[-] spartanatreyu@programming.dev 27 points 2 months ago

Serious question for anyone who actually uses Bun:

Why are you using Bun instead of Deno or Node?

If you would have asked me 10 years ago, what were the biggest problems with JS as a whole, I would have stated:

  1. Poor type safety

  2. No standard library which leads people into dependency hell

  3. Poor security (installing a project should not even allow the possibility of key stealing or ransomware)

  4. No runtime ergonomic immutable data structures with fast equality checks (looked like it was going to be resolved with the Records and Tuples proposal, but it was withdrawn and discussions are continuing in the composites proposal)


Today I consider point 1 mostly resolved and point 4 a problem for TC39 and engine implementers, and not resolvable by runtimes themselves.

That leaves us with problems 2 and 3.

I see Node having poor solutions for 2 and 3.

I see Bun having poor solutions for 2 and 3.

I see Deno having great solutions for 2 and 3.


As far as I can tell, people have chosen Bun for either hype or speed reasons.

Hype doesn't seem like an important reason to choose Bun since it's always fleeting and there's enough investment in the industry to keep each runtime going for a long time.

I do see speed being a moderate issue with JS, but that's mainly due to:

  • dependency install times which should be a one time cost, and which can be reduced anyway by using a standard library

  • slow framework slop, which isn't really a runtime issue.

So I'm not sure speed fits as a reason for choosing Bun.

I'm not sure what the other reasons are, but I'm genuinely curious.

If you're using Bun in projects today, why have you chosen bun?

[-] s4if@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

Simply for convenience and speed. Nothing more.

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[-] tonytins@pawb.social 21 points 2 months ago

Welp. Guess I'm switching to Deno.

[-] SlartyBartFast@sh.itjust.works 20 points 2 months ago

How misanthropic

[-] rozodru@pie.andmc.ca 16 points 2 months ago

yeah as a dev myself I saw this coming a few months back and stopped using Bun so this doesn't surprise me. They got on the cursor hype train awhile back and that was enough for me.

[-] Sunsofold@lemmings.world 16 points 2 months ago

Uhoh, now the anaconda is going to want some.

[-] fubarx@lemmy.world 15 points 2 months ago

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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[-] cornshark@lemmy.world 12 points 2 months ago

What's bun? Some other comments mention a js runtime so is it like a V8 competitor?

[-] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 2 months ago

A bundler, a transpiler, a runtime (designed to be a drop-in replacement for Node.js), test runner, and a package manager - all in one.

Bun's single-file executables turned out to be perfect for distributing CLI tools. You can compile any JavaScript project into a self-contained binary—runs anywhere, even if the user doesn't have Bun or Node installed. Works with native addons. Fast startup. Easy to distribute.

[-] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

It's more of a node.js competitor, but it doesn't use v8, it uses safaris js engine. https://bun.com/blog/how-bun-supports-v8-apis-without-using-v8-part-1

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[-] termaxima@slrpnk.net 11 points 2 months ago

Evil spreads its tendrils further yet.

[-] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yup, even AI companies are being infected by the evil of Javascript!

[-] Taevas@beehaw.org 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Man, Bun's great, I've been using it since 1.0.0 essentially so that REALLY sucks

Like some of the other people commentating on this thread, I'll look into using something else, but it's really sad and frustrating that I need to switch things over and over again

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[-] e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

People who are surprised by VC funded software going to shit...

Funniest thing I I've seen in ages.

Seriously, this always happens. At some point the investors want a huge payout and they will get it by exploiting existing users or they just shutdown the whole company and strip it for parts.

[-] pennomi@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago

Well, worst case scenario someone can fork it.

[-] Davel23@fedia.io 8 points 2 months ago
[-] QWho@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

Maybe, with 'AI agents', code can, for the first time in history, fork itself.

[-] Madrigal@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

> Uses JavaScript in 2025.

> Complains about enshittification.

[-] tonytins@pawb.social 11 points 2 months ago

JavaScript was built for the web. That's fine. It's corporations that took it out of its comfort zone even when better alternatives emerged.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

Hey! Sometimes it mostly works, and that's all I can reasonably ask for anymore.

[-] kibiz0r@midwest.social 7 points 2 months ago

Eh, it’s fine. It has some bad choices baked into it, but what language doesn’t? And JS in 2025 is miles better than JS in 2005.

I wouldn’t choose it for every project, but it’s a reasonable choice in many cases.

[-] traches@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 months ago

The fuck else am I supposed to make websites with, rust compiled to WASM?

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[-] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 months ago

That sucks. I was really liking bun.

[-] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago

For anyone wondering wtf Bun is, it's a project championing JavaScript. It wants to replace node.js.

On a tangent, I recently switched from a cinnamon desktop (which uses TypeScript or some form of js) to KDE-plasma because I noticed that cinnamon occasionally couldn't keep up with rapid mouse movements (and my machine is high end). KDE-plasma handles it fine and even has a "find my mouse" feature that turns doing the "draw fast circles to see if the mouse drifts all over the screen because the handler can't keep up with the updates" into a game of "how big can I make the cursor".

I wish the whole "let's keep javascript as a thing" movement would just die out. Other languages aren't hard to learn, why are so many people obsessed with sticking with js and shoehorning fixes for its massive flaws instead of just letting it die?

[-] myotheraccount@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago

Not saying it should be used for everything, but it is a pretty decent language nowadays (lots of the annoying parts have been fixed in the last 15yrs). Although the main benefit imho is, that it is the closest thing we have to an interpreted language that runs everywhere.

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[-] clif@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

Damn it. I've been following bun for a long time and using it casually... Guess it's good I didn't get too far into it

[-] LostWanderer@fedia.io 5 points 2 months ago

As a regular joe on the web, it doesn't affect me directly, yet. However, I foresee more slop sites getting put out there in as the Execucult's naked desire to worship and exalt the thing they are desperately trying to make fetch: AI. This year is so fucking weird with all the AI glazing and executives trying to desperately will AI into a moneymaking thing. Spoiler Alert: It's probably going to continue hemorrhaging money as most people can't be arsed to use it nor do they want products with it crammed in.

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this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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