Author here: I don't need or want another Bun release or an NPM release or anything like that. Like I very clearly say in the article I just got chatting with a peer about the Bun rewrite and I decided to take a look.
I'm consistently skeptical about new tech whether it is NoSQL or Blockchain or Serverless. Some of the things I'm skeptical about fail and some succeed.
The bun Port is a phenomenal engineering achievement that would have taken a team of people over a year or two to deliver previously - look at the TypeScript port for example (and they had llms).
The fact it's taking a while to release is still insanely fast. I'm sure they may be some bumps.
Being skeptical is good and some stuff succeeds and some doesn't - but building tools is still fun and cool, whether it's useful or widely adopted or not :)
> Anthropic is dogfooding this, the machine is still ticking along, and Anthropic employees are directly involved.
The problem is that your article's central claim is that there hasn't been a Bun release since the Rust rewrite - which can be read as implying that the rewrite hasn't been used in production.
But it's been used in production on millions of machines running Claude Code for over a month!
I think failing to acknowledge that hurts the credibility of the article. It's been a heated discussion point in this thread already.
> which can be read as implying that the rewrite hasn't been used in production.
Well it hasn't. "Production" for a language runtime means being generally available for arbitrary use. The engineers that built the runtime using it to release one closed source binary to the public is, at best, an extremely narrow beta test.
Why are you resistant to adding a sentence to the article that notes that Claude Code uses the rewrite?
Do you think it would weaken the article?
When I said it would improve the credibility I did mean it. My instinct on reading the article this morning was "this person doesn't know that Claude Code runs on Bun, which weakens their credibility in presenting the argument they are making here."
To me this seems like an odd preoccupation for an article that is very little about the Bun rewrite as a running program and very much about the process of the re-write and how it came to be in commits to the repository.
You could argue that the release tag isn't important - but at the top of this comment thread a member of the team confirms they delayed the release to finish some extra testing. So the ambiguity around if the project is complete and pointing to the lack of a release mirrors internal sentiment as well.
I had a funny thought that Bun might add a release tag while I was still writing the article. In that case I'd still publish it, because the point is we still don't know the cost it took to get to a viable, wide, release. The $165k isn't the full story.
I try not to publish articles that call out mistakes by other people just for the sake of it. I've written a fair amount about the Bun rewrite already - https://simonwillison.net/search/?q=bun%20rust
I don't think that's true. I think a fair chunk of them are places where Bun is handed a pointer by WebKit or something similar. I believe they write about this a little.
I think there's a reasonable expectation that unsafe could still be reduced by having shared, safer abstractions - that would lead to fewer `unsafe` results because the `unsafe` would be contained. I'm surprised that this isn't a higher priority target for them.
The initial post said something like 11 days and $165k in tokens and it's done. The charts in the OP suggest that Something Interesting happened between July 8th and today, burning way more tokens and human labour. Wouldn't you want to know what?
Either you mean retrospective, or you're being unnecessarily mean for something that's been getting quite a lot update reports, just on a social medium you probably don't use =P
A postmortem is for reflecting on something that went so wrong you had to kill it, and you want to objectively describe what led to that, and what lessons can be learnt from the failure.
A retrospective is just the reflecting part, without implying you believe it is going to fail and you're looking for some schadenfreude ;)
This might be terminology that's used differently in different places.
For instance, in video games it is extremely common to use "postmortem" to mean "post-shipping."
Yes; I think what I described matches that meaning?
Post-death, as in: "it's over," "activity has halted," "no more work being done."
Death does not necessarily have a bad/negative connotation. It's just the end of something.
This is in contrast to the original comment: "something that went so wrong you had to kill it." Death does not imply something went wrong or that it happened forcefully.
I guess "autopsy" generally is talking about "finding the cause of death" so maybe that has a more negative connotation ("something (bad) happened, causing death, let's find it").
Languages change. That word "literally", which you just used, meant one thing for decades (centuries?) ... and now it also (literally) means the exact opposite.
You can be the crabby old guy complaining about how the youth ruined English ... or you can accept that languages aren't immutable, and that the meaning of postmortem is no longer it's literal meaning.
> But postmortem is literally “post death” in Latin.
Sure, that's true. It's not really relevant to people who don't speak Latin.
> It’s synonymous with autopsy!
This isn't true. I have no idea how you got here. In English an autopsy is a surgical procedure performed on a corpse for the purpose of identifying the cause of death. In particular, it's a noun. "Post-mortem" in the etymologically literal "after death" sense is an adverb or adjective identifying whatever it is as taking place chronologically after some contextually-specified death.
But, you seem to put some weight on the etymology of a word independently of its current meaning. In that case autopsy "literally means" to witness something personally, as opposed to hearing about it from someone else. (It's "self-eye" in Greek just as post mortem is "after death" in Latin.) Somehow I doubt that's what you had in mind...?
An autopsy is an exam that is performed postmortem. And that’s really how people are using postmortem as a noun for the analysis that they perform after the “death” of a company, so it is a synonym at least approximately, if you don’t see that I guess you don’t have a very good imagination.
Try and find me some sentences out there on the internet in which one of the words could be reasonably substituted for the other one.
They don't mean similar things and they aren't used similarly. A postmortem is, as you note in part, a report or a meeting for the purpose of producing or discussing such a report; an autopsy is a surgical procedure. They're as "synonymous" as the words "cigarette" and "cancer".
> The goal of a postmortem is to draw meaningful conclusions to help you learn from your past successes and failures. Despite its grim-sounding name, a postmortem can be an extremely productive method of improving your development practices.
I've been reading people use "postmortem" to describe software retrospectives for like... 15+ years.
Mostly in the opensource, or marketing-blog spaces. The detailed investigation and fix report was a favorite genre of blogpost. And if someone's bragging about the design of an enhancement, or investigating a bug, then the overall product isn't dead. They're (usually) not talking shit to anyone. It's the bug that's dead. Or security indecent that's over. Or a schedule milestone that's "dead and burred".
It's a 1 chili pepper level of spicy to use a slang term that relates to death. I'd never read it as hoping someone fails. I think people let the corpotalk center of the brain overreact to anything that's not couched in euphemism.
Author here: I'm also not sure how much we can glean from any of that!!! I look forward to Anthropic or Bun releasing a retrospective after their next release that fully outlines the cost.
Given their history with previous other marketing stunts I do not expect any retrospective. The technology is real but I have little faith in open and honest communication from Anthropic.
truth. We'll just have to wait and see what the frequency and severity of bug reports is going forward. I have my biases, but I'm not going to make any forecasts here. I'm content to let the evidence dribble in. However, I don't rely on Bun for any critical systems. i.e. I realize it's easy for me to have a wait and see attitude with this one.
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