Article URL: https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837877 Points: 236 # Comments: 124

Disclosure: Bun was acquired by Anthropic in December 2025. I and others on the Bun team work at Anthropic. I used a pre-release version of Claude Fable 5 for much of the Rust rewrite. Bun started as a line-for-line port of esbuild's JavaScript & TypeScript transpiler from Go to Zig. I wrote my first line of Zig on April 16, 2021. I bet on Zig after seeing the single-page Zig Language Reference on Hacker News and getting really excited about the low-level control and care for performance. The initial version of Bun was written by me in 1 year, in a cramped Oakland apartment, pre-LLM, in Zig. The default outcome for ambitiously-scoped projects like Bun is joining the graveyard of dead side projects on a GitHub profile page. Zig made Bun possible. I would never have been able to build this much in 1 year if it wasn't for Zig. Nowadays, Bun's CLI gets over 22 million monthly downloads. Popular tools like Claude Code and OpenCode bet on Bun as their runtime. Vercel, Railway, DigitalOcean and more have 1st-party support for Bun. Bun's scope has also been a challenge for stability. Here's a small sample of bugs we fixed in Bun v1.3.14: We could have kept fixing these kinds of bugs one-off in perpetuity, but we owe it to our users counting on us to do better than that, and systematically prevent these kinds of bugs from recurring. Our bugfix list felt bad and I was tired of going to sleep worrying about crashes in Bun. I don't blame Zig for that - other users of Zig don't have the bugs we had, and mixing GC with manually-managed memory is an uncommon enough thing for software to need that no language really designs for it. We wouldn't have gotten this far if not for Zig, and I'll always be grateful. Until very recently, programming language choice was a one-way decision for a project like Bun. JavaScript is a garbage-collected language and modern JavaScript engines like JavaScriptCore (and V8) have strict rules around exception handling and the garbage collector. Zig, like C, doesn't manage memory for you and this is a tradeoff that for many projects is a great reason to use Zig. Zig does not have constructors/destructors, and most cleanup is expected to be written out explicitly at each call site with defer.