Article URL: https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843352 Points: 275 # Comments: 195

When Jarred joined the Zig community about 5 years ago, I described him as someone who had strong "beginner energy". That is, he moved fast and tried a lot of different stuff, jumping head first into problems that he was not yet equipped to solve, leading to mediocre outcomes in terms of engineering, but learning a whole heck of a lot in the process. I see it as quite a healthy attitude, particularly for young people and students. This is the best way to level up and learn new things. As he focused his efforts on Bun he began to attract attention. JavaScript being the most popular programming language in the world, there are a lot of potential eyeballs on a promising new toolchain. This attention could have been harnessed in a few different ways. For example, he could have easily achieved a solid living via crowdfunding, even for San Francisco standards. But having graduated from the Thiel Fellowship school of thought rather than university, he was essentially groomed from a young age into uncritically embracing the Silicon Valley mindset, and he took venture capital. From the beginning, Jarred was appreciative towards the Zig project. He credited Zig on the Bun website for the project's performance achievements. He set up a monthly donation to Zig Software Foundation that amounted to $60,000 per year. He didn't have to do either of those things, but he did, and it was pretty cool of him. Even in his blog post that I'm referencing, he expresses what I perceive as sincere grattitude towards the Zig project. However, once Bun became a VC-backed startup, he started racing towards the finish line. Now, instead of working on a free and open source project, learning and growing with the community, Jarred was running a business. It was at this point - when he suddenly became a manager - that this "beginner energy" started to hit differently for me. It's one thing to choose a poor work-life balance for oneself; a different thing entirely to demand it of others: I talked to those who interviewed for a job at Oven. I talked to people who worked there. Those people talked to each other. Everybody talked to everybody. The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective. Consequently, although Zig community members were eager to find work coding in Zig on the clock, most of the talent pool steered clear of Oven and Bun. At the same time, a rift between Zig and Jarred started widening. His singular focus on productivity and his startup's exit strategy was increasingly at odds with my longer term vision for the Zig project. I remember he kept nagging me to drop all my other priorities and work on a Language Server Protocol implementation and VSCode integration, while I had bigger plans.