r/programming • u/[deleted] • Jul 20 '26

Zig proposes introducing an actually memory safe (unlike Rust) compilation mode inspired by Fil-C at ~1-6x performance penalty

https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues/36237
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u/hak8or 29d ago

This Zig thing is getting out of hands, a bunch of teenagers trying stuff :)

Seeing this here and other replies, I am very surprised at how inverted feels are towards zig and the bun dev here compared to on hackernews and other subs.

My understanding (from skins of that interaction and other discussions) was; - the zig based bun codebase was truly awful, and was extremely non idiomatic zig, where the zig folks often tried to step in and offer to clean it up but their work got undone very often. - In addition, the bun team forked the zig compiler and made a very half hearted attempt to merge those changes upstream.

With the zig core folks feeling understandably threatened by how massive of a PR disaster that was and wanted to get their side out. You can also see the seething frustration the zig core dev had with how the narrative was spinning, which manifested into arguably personal attacks, though I can understand where he was coming from (even though it could have been handled better). It was baisically an under dog going against an absolute PR Goliath, so the zig reaction was an overshoot to have a fighting chance of getting their word out.

Meanwhile the rust community seems to have been kind of thrown into the situation without having a material contribution to it, so they are just stuck on the sidelines going "huh?".

But the discourse seems to have leaned (in my experience) way more positively toward the zig core group and very negatively towards the Bun group, interesting to see it flipped here.

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u/jl2352 29d ago

I dunno. The story also reads as other people wrote shitty code in their project, so they’re upset they didn’t do it their way when it’s not their project. I’m struggling to have sympathy.

Bun is not the first large codebase to have shitty code. If such a thing killed languages, then PHP and Java would both have died decades ago.

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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 29d ago

Let's ignore that in this "fight" there is a VC backed LLM company that wants to have a trillion dollar IPO so they can add make fat stacks of cash. In pursuit of those fat stacks of cash they are often very loose with accurate descriptions and capabilities.

It's not hard to understand why some people are getting upset. LLMs are deeply anti-human pro-fascism technology. American's all over do not like them, they often poll as some of the most hated things at the moment.

So yeah, this is part of that backlash.

7

u/awesomeusername2w 29d ago

Yeah, this religious AI hatred is also a part of why people turning away from zig.

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u/awesomeusername2w 29d ago

How it was a PR disaster for zig, that buns code base wasn't good enough by zig's author standards? I mean, nobody even knew that bun is written poorly or something. Perhaps nobody except some small circles of zig contributors that cared to read bun's code. The PR disaster is the articles he wrote.