Bun is joining Anthropic
bun.com
Bun has been acquired by Anthropic. Anthropic is betting on Bun as the infrastructure powering Claude Code, Claude Agent SDK, and future AI coding products & tools.

Biggest WTF news I’ve read today. I’m not a web dev so this doesn’t affect me, but this is bizarre.

We get a closer first look at what’s around the corner for AI coding tools, and make Bun better for it

This incredibly popular tool is now going to merge with an AI company and shift gears to be turned into some forced AI hype machine. Yipee! Exactly what all the devs were hoping for! /s

  • justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io
    53·
    3 days ago

    Not overly surprising.

    Google and Salesforce have been “developing” new features and products this way for at least the last 13 years?

    1. Find promising small business/startup
    2. Buy it with your war chest money
    3. Force them to integrate with your systems and live inside your walled garden.
      • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.caEnglish
        17·
        3 days ago

        yes, so long as you don’t them putting pressure on your suppliers and helping your competitors, I guess

      • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        2 days ago

        I mean, technically yes.

        But mega corpos have so much money to throw at you that at one point, it’s hard to say no and very few people can refuse.

        It is generational wealth that is being offered to the shareholders. I know I would fold.

      • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        26·
        2 days ago

        Amazon.com acquired parent Quidsi, Inc. for $545 million on November 8, 2010. Prior to Amazon’s purchase, Amazon sold diapers at steep losses in order to undercut Diapers.com and drive down the purchase price of the company.

        No. Not if they really want to buy you.

        Source

      • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        5·
        2 days ago

        Yes but… not really.

        If you’re amazingly talented and spend 10 years of your life building something amazing but have no money, when someone offers you millions you’re just gonna take it.

      • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
        8·
        3 days ago

        Getting bought is often the whole point for a founder, since that’s one of a few ways for you to get a big payday.

        Getting bought only really happens if a majority of the shareholders agree to it, so you can reject it as much as you want.

      • jonathan@piefed.socialEnglish
        6·
        2 days ago

        It depends on how much of the company you gave away when you took on investment. If you no longer have the controlling share you can be overruled.

  • spartanatreyu@programming.dev
    26·
    2 days ago

    Serious question for anyone who actually uses Bun:

    Why are you using Bun instead of Deno or Node?

    If you would have asked me 10 years ago, what were the biggest problems with JS as a whole, I would have stated:

    1. Poor type safety

    2. No standard library which leads people into dependency hell

    3. Poor security (installing a project should not even allow the possibility of key stealing or ransomware)

    4. No runtime ergonomic immutable data structures with fast equality checks (looked like it was going to be resolved with the Records and Tuples proposal, but it was withdrawn and discussions are continuing in the composites proposal)

    Today I consider point 1 mostly resolved and point 4 a problem for TC39 and engine implementers, and not resolvable by runtimes themselves.

    That leaves us with problems 2 and 3.

    I see Node having poor solutions for 2 and 3.

    I see Bun having poor solutions for 2 and 3.

    I see Deno having great solutions for 2 and 3.

    As far as I can tell, people have chosen Bun for either hype or speed reasons.

    Hype doesn’t seem like an important reason to choose Bun since it’s always fleeting and there’s enough investment in the industry to keep each runtime going for a long time.

    I do see speed being a moderate issue with JS, but that’s mainly due to:

    • dependency install times which should be a one time cost, and which can be reduced anyway by using a standard library

    • slow framework slop, which isn’t really a runtime issue.

    So I’m not sure speed fits as a reason for choosing Bun.

    I’m not sure what the other reasons are, but I’m genuinely curious.

    If you’re using Bun in projects today, why have you chosen bun?

    • Juanjo Salvador@programming.dev
      2·
      2 days ago

      I don’t know many people who choose Bun instead of Node or Deno, but all of them do it because speed.

      IMHO, I like Deno because it’s offering solutions for everything and trying to not fall into same issues Node had (same creator, trying to apologize), but eventually I run into Node because TypeScript and easy-to-use (in my experience). Anyway, Bun always has been to me like the third wheel of the bike.

      • spartanatreyu@programming.dev
        2·
        1 day ago

        Pretty sure Deno had that first though.

        Deno launched with an all-tools-in-one approach and then you could use deno bundle to compile everything into a single binary that you could run on another machine.

        Then they briefly broke deno bundle in their 2.0 release when they added node/npm compatibility then brought it back in 2.4.

  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
    101·
    2 days ago

    For anyone wondering wtf Bun is, it’s a project championing JavaScript. It wants to replace node.js.

    On a tangent, I recently switched from a cinnamon desktop (which uses TypeScript or some form of js) to KDE-plasma because I noticed that cinnamon occasionally couldn’t keep up with rapid mouse movements (and my machine is high end). KDE-plasma handles it fine and even has a “find my mouse” feature that turns doing the “draw fast circles to see if the mouse drifts all over the screen because the handler can’t keep up with the updates” into a game of “how big can I make the cursor”.

    I wish the whole “let’s keep javascript as a thing” movement would just die out. Other languages aren’t hard to learn, why are so many people obsessed with sticking with js and shoehorning fixes for its massive flaws instead of just letting it die?

    • myotheraccount@lemmy.world
      41·
      2 days ago

      Not saying it should be used for everything, but it is a pretty decent language nowadays (lots of the annoying parts have been fixed in the last 15yrs). Although the main benefit imho is, that it is the closest thing we have to an interpreted language that runs everywhere.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
        5·
        2 days ago

        Isn’t Python also widely supported these days?

        Though I’ll always prefer compiled languages over interpreted and I think cross compiling is also in the best state it ever has been, though dependencies can complicate things still, as well as any inline assembly use.

        • myotheraccount@lemmy.world
          4·
          2 days ago

          Supported as in “you can install an interpreter on most machines”: yes

          But for JS it’s already there. You can just write a program, upload it someone, send someone a link and it runs. And it’s even sandboxed.

          (Although thanks to webassembly, that will be true for many more languages as well, so maybe my argument is void)

    • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      Eh, it’s fine. It has some bad choices baked into it, but what language doesn’t? And JS in 2025 is miles better than JS in 2005.

      I wouldn’t choose it for every project, but it’s a reasonable choice in many cases.

      • Madrigal@lemmy.worldEnglish
        94·
        2 days ago

        It’s my opinion that the modern web is massively enshittified, and was so long before that term came into play.

        Too much focus on flashy (and often obstructive) presentation, constant reinvention of the wheel, and no regard for the actual information being delivered.

        I mean, you mention “semantic markup” to your average web developer and they just stare at you blankly. They’re like the seagulls from Finding Nemo: DIV? DIV! DIV!

        Useful information structures? Meaningful metadata? Consistent patterns? Forget about it.

        HTML and JavaScript are part of the problem. They provide too much freedom and not nearly enough structure or guidance.

        And even if you put all that aside, JavaScript is an abomination that is entirely unsuited to the purpose it’s being used for. Ask any JS developer. Or look at how many ridiculous frameworks have been slapped over the top of it in a vain attempt to address its inadequacies.

    • Tony Bark@pawb.socialEnglish
      12·
      3 days ago

      JavaScript was built for the web. That’s fine. It’s corporations that took it out of its comfort zone even when better alternatives emerged.

      • DoctorPress@lemmy.zip
        5·
        3 days ago

        It is only used because it is the only available option on web. Don’t bitch me about webassembly when it is missing half of the api and doubles up page load time.

        • aichan@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          WASM is that much slower? I get that needing a f*** Js wrapper to be able to use the DOM cannot be good, but is there really that much of a difference?

  • Lena@gregtech.euEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    Ah fuck, o7 bun. It was a pretty nice runtime, Deno it is now I guess.

    I’m so glad I don’t have to use JS

  • fubarx@lemmy.world
    195·
    3 days ago

    It’s not a bad outcome. Bun is cool but has $0 revenue and some hand-wavy thing about future paid cloud services. This way, larger companies will give them a more serious shot than they would a small startup.

    It still doesn’t have a revenue story, but it’s now strapped onto the side of one of the few AI companies with a decent chance of surviving the next AI Winter. And if Anthropic goes sideways, the Bun engineers can fork the code and keep going.

    • planish@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      2 days ago

      Why does Anthropic think they need a JS runtime though? Are they just like “well Microsoft has a command line tool for installing JS packages so we need one too”???

      • fubarx@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 days ago

        On the AI coding IDE side, VSCode has pretty much hoovered up everyone, mainly because JetBrains offered their own AI option, which kept competitors away. On the server side, though, integrating with AI is still wide open.

        You eventually have to hit Python because of all the ML libraries. But you can run that as a separate microservice or process. Here’s a chance to do something whacky, like let JS invoke Python-ML inline, or port the main ML libraries to JS, or cross-compile JS to CUDA (just spit-balling here). It’ll be a lot easier to try these experiments than trying to push it upstream into Node.

        Plus, Bun is used by a bunch of cross-platform CLI tools, including Claude Code, so they can make sure there are no breaking changes.

        TBH, I’m surprised nobody’s snapped up Mojo (and Chris Lattner). They have a lot more advanced, AI-relevant, cross-platform tech.

  • rozodru@pie.andmc.caEnglish
    17·
    3 days ago

    yeah as a dev myself I saw this coming a few months back and stopped using Bun so this doesn’t surprise me. They got on the cursor hype train awhile back and that was enough for me.

  • clif@lemmy.world
    5·
    3 days ago

    Damn it. I’ve been following bun for a long time and using it casually… Guess it’s good I didn’t get too far into it