Jarred Sumner (Jarred Sumner), creator and primary developer of the server-side JavaScript platform Bun, created Git branch, in which I started rewriting Bun from the Zig language to Rust. The rewriting is carried out using the AI assistant Claude, for which a separate porting guide has been created. According to Jarred’s words, this is still only an experiment, not an official port, and there is a high probability that the matter will not go further than the experiment and the rewritten code will not be used.
The porting has not yet been completed, and at the current stage all interest in the project is focused on assessing how efficient the port will be, whether it will be pass a set of tests for the main project and whether it will be difficult to maintain the new code. The plan is to eventually benchmark Bun variants on Zig and Rust.
Anthropic acquired the Bun project last December, so Jarred has the resources to be involved in porting Claude’s cutting-edge AI models. The Bun platform is used in the Claude Code and Claude Agent SDK products, and Anthropic is interested in improving its quality and development. Bun is one of the most successful projects in the Zig language, while the developers of Zig and Bun zig-anti-ai have differing opinions regarding the use of AI in the development process. The Zig project has approved a strict prohibition of the use of large language models when preparing pull requests, issues and comments (even translation of non-English-language comments through AI is prohibited).
The introduction of such restrictions is explained by the Zig developers’ negative experience in reviewing those created through AI pull requests that waste resources and time (for example, pointless changes, AI hallucinations and bloated commits of 10 thousand lines are noted). In addition, the Zig project positions itself as being contributor-centric rather than contributor-centric – the main purpose of accepting pull requests is not to add new code, but to help develop new contributors.
Author Bun disagrees with the ban on AI in Zig and believes The AI slope will remain a nostalgic relic of 2025 and 2026, and open source development will evolve to the point of banning accepting code from humans. People will discuss problems, set tasks and prioritize, and writing code and submitting changes to repositories will become the domain of AI. Other reasons cited for experimenting with rewriting in Rust include a desire to fix problems in Bun caused by memory leaks, and Zig’s policy of accepting changes to the language that break compatibility, which is unacceptable for large projects.
Due to the ban on the use of AI, Bun developers are forced to maintain their own fork