Andrew Kelley’s response essay on Bun’s Rust rewrite
Useful counterpoint to simplistic “Rust beat Zig” narratives; the sharper story is incentives, engineering quality, and what startup pressure does to language/tooling choices.
Logged at IST: 2026-07-10 20:31 IST
What it is: Andrew Kelley’s response essay on Bun’s Rust rewrite
Gist: Frames the rewrite less as a language indictment and more as a consequence of Bun’s startup incentives, weak engineering discipline, and management culture. He argues Zig was a good fit for Bun’s early ambition, but the real failure mode was accumulating technical debt under venture-backed speed pressure rather than the language itself.
Newsletter angle: Useful counterpoint to simplistic “Rust beat Zig” narratives; the sharper story is incentives, engineering quality, and what startup pressure does to language/tooling choices.