Yeah, exactly. It's weird that Zig even responded to that. Imagining that your studio switched from Unity to Unreal and Unity proceeded to release a hit piece attacking your codebase quality and workplace environment.
But that hit piece would be an answer to the (multi-billion dollar) studio saying how much better the result is after the rewrite to Unreal, except it's not because Unreal is better (which it could be btw, or not, or more probably it depends on the use case), it's because the studio worked hard to make it look better, which they could have done without the rewrite.
Anthropic does this to sell LLM rewrites and make them look better than they actually are, Zig being the source language, they are a collateral victim of that misleading advertisement. Of course it's unfair to them and of course they should highlight this.
There was an almost exact example of this: City Skyline 2. It's (was) a poorly optimized game and they said Unity's DOTS didn't match their expectation, making Unity look bad, while some issues (like they didn't use LoD where they should have) weren't Unity's fault.
And even in this case, it'd be extremely weird if Unity published a blog post about how City Skyline's studio is a "Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective" (quoting Andrew word by word here).
This is actually is an interesting example, because Cities Skylines 2 has been handed over from Colossal Order to Iceflake Studios recently and since then they have (in my opinion) quickly been able to improve and fix a lot of things that CO weren't able pull off for years. So perhaps CO's development was somewhat of a "total shit show"?
I'm not saying Unity should publish PR about how Unity is working well and this handover and subsequent fixes proves it, but I think you could argue that they could and that they would have at least some facts to back it up with.
Anthropic is massively bigger than a studio, Zig is massively smaller than Unity, and it wasn’t a quiet switch, it was a huge publicity event. It’s more like the #1 movie of the year being “The Profound Joy of Finally Leaving Unity”. Sometimes things are big enough to warrant a response.
It was a pull request and a blog post which HN et al. collectively foamed at the mouth about. You’re acting like Anthropic sunk millions into a marketing campaign.
Anthropic produced the tokens. They don’t have pay themselves retail API rates for them.
The cost was only provided as an honest estimate of what it would have cost someone else at time of writing, which I thought was fair.
The number is peanuts relative to the cost of engineers working on the project. I find it odd that so many people think this cost number is some sort of smoking gun.
At the same time, Anthropic is still running at a loss, so should this actually be 300k? 500k?
Anyway, the exact number doesn't really matter in the context of my comment anyway (which was meant to facetiously note that the marketing campaign includes the Bun rewrite)
It’s not weird considering what we’ve learned through this:
the Zig project is driven by people with fragile emotions and egos who lash out at people personally when they feel threatened.
We’d like Zig to be a project with steady and technically driven leadership like Rust, but Kelley has made clear (many times) it’s more of an egoistic vanity project like Elm, designed to cater to the emotional needs of the BDFL.
Well, if your game would be one of very few AAA games written in Unity (actually, the only game written in Unity people reasonably familiar with the subject would be able to name off the top of their heads), things might look different...
> 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
Yeah, exact words you would expect from someone who is happy about a win-win situation.
Andrew is bitter (or something related) about this whole situation, that's no question, he writes it in his updated post (he doesn't say "bitter", but he speaks about unprocessed emotions).
People are entitled to their emotions. The question is whether the bitterness is warranted. I think it is.
Yes, people are entitled to their emotions, but the ways they behave in public and express their emotions reflects on them in a major way. The Bun blog post focused on the technical reasons to change, and was complimentary about Zig. The Zig blog post was heavy on personal attacks, with some technical claims that the Bun blog post had mostly addressed already. Between the two, the Bun post is a lot more compelling from technical and professional perspectives.
I'll admit to thinking that the Rust crowd often has a toxic atmosphere, but Zig came off as worse in this exchange.
When accusing someone of "good looking lies", it would help to provide an example or two with an explanation of why you think they're lies (rather than mistakes, oversights or differences of opinion). Complaints that the post "subtly and misleadingly throws shade at Zig" are hard to accept without that kind of support.
> Of course when you are the creator of Zig, that may feel quite unfair and you should highlight it.
Then highlight that, don't repeatedly insult someone. If Andrew thinks the same kind of ai-assisted improvement would be possible in Zig, and that avoiding the kinds of errors migrating to rust achieved would be possible in Zig, he should demonstrate it. And I don't necessarily mean rewriting all of Bun in "better-zig", but like, if you're going to say "this project is bad because it is badly maintained, not because the language has limitations" then demonstrate something to that effect.
The only technical detail I recall from Andrew's post is that zig has faster compile times, which may well be true but what do I care?
Why not? Sharing your experience with working with people is fine, they're subjective opinions. Does this mean it's slander and/or a hit piece? Seemingly a lot of people would say so, personally I don't think people sharing those sort of experience publicly are doing so out of spite, some of us are just still used to the old-internet where you can share stuff like this in public, without getting piled on for not "thinking/writing the right way" or whatever people are complaining about.
> Incredible the different takeaways people get from text content on the internet
It is incredible isn't it.
"Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs"
"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."
"at some point they would sell out (let's be honest, their vague "sell some cloud something" business plan was a farce from the get-go"
"he was essentially groomed from a young age into uncritically embracing the Silicon Valley mindset"
There is more but I'll stop quoting to not end up copying the whole thing.
nah. I have no horse in this race in fact before this blog I had high regards for andrew and zig, less-so after this blog.
You're accusing me of cherry picking, can you explain how these are cherry picked ? do you even know what cherry picking means ? maybe explain the important context for "Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs" that I omitted apparently.
...Unity made a blog post saying they were happy about you moving to Unreal, publishing they think it'd be a win-win, then outlining why they think so
I mean, that makes it all sound very polite and dispassionate, but Andrew's piece was anything but. I have no dog in this fight, I don't use Zig, Rust, Bun or Claude, and initially I thought the bun rewrite sounded like a terrible idea. I changed my mind after reading the piece about the migration - it was very interesting and the process was obviously quite thoughtful. Andrew's piece made me want to take a shower afterwards.
And what is even the point of saying that Andrew dislikes how Jarred acts and works?
Let's say the supervisor wants you to write a new microservice. Do you refuse to do it because the supervisor smokes cigarettes and you're an anti-smoker? I think that if you have objections, you should refuse only on technical grounds, not personal.
It is in there nature. They (specially zig creator) were so jealous about about vlang getting traction and getting $800/month donations, they made it their core mission to attack vlang and spread hate.
Vlang is a ridiculous project that was entirely driven by hype that should have been easy for all to see straight through. It is ridiculous that it got $800/month with nothing to show for it. I haven't seen any hate spread for it by Zig.
With over 37,500 stars, over 2,300 forks, 826 contributors, books written on it (in Japanese and Portuguese, besides English), and a Wikipedia page; vlang is clearly a significant and successful open-source project.
> entirely driven by hype
People can plainly see Zig (and other HN pushed languages) directly engaging in marketing propaganda and hype (with HN accounts clearly stating they are from those projects) using social media (including HN) at levels way beyond anything anyone could accuse the V project of doing. The creator of vlang is also not a native English speaker, where the creator of Zig (and other competitors) have no such excuse. They know exactly what they are saying, the connotations of it, the cultural nuance surrounding it, and what it means in English.
> ridiculous that it got $800/month with nothing to show for it
Jealousy over vlang getting as much (or more) donation money (in 2019) from its supporters was a central theme in numerous social media and website posts made directly by Andrew Kelley[1]. Even to the extent he and the Odin creator[2] were asking people to give them money, instead of to the V project. Many would consider such behavior as extremely bad and unprofessional. Also note, there is no reverse of such behavior to be seen by the V community at them, instead we see uncalled for conduct and statements being directed by them towards the V project.
Donations that vlang had received and continue to receive, is from their supporters. Some of these paying supporters have even come to HN, to publicly express their support[3][4][5] against competitor false accusations and disinformation. Competitors should have nothing to do with someone else's supporters giving donations, in the same way that vlang's creator does not speak on who donates or supports their projects.
> I haven't seen any hate spread for it by Zig.
It is documented, on HN no less (and elsewhere), where people can see Zig's creator directly slandering vlang's creator[6] and this kind of unprofessional behavior encouraged followers to do similar.
I don't see any hate in these references. Perhaps just truths you don't want to hear. I've seen your name pop up multiple times in past conversations about V in response to anything less than positive. What's your involvement with the language to watch its discussions so ardently?
Yeah this is why Vlang is banned from discussion on HN; any time it comes up people have a critical thing to say about Vlang, these guys descend with paragraphs, links, and a list of grievances about how their language is slandered and hated by people fueled with envy. Doesn’t matter if it’s buried in a thread in a comment section in an unrelated story, these guys rush in to defend the honor of Vlang.
Meanwhile, years later Vlang still have not delivered on the initial claims that made the language even remotely interesting.
People know what jealousy, slander, and unprofessional behavior are. Including how the V project is treated, regardless if certain others pretend not to or try to blank out others for noticing.
> What's your involvement with the language
Just responding to the comments of others, like the truthful one made by f-serif.
Not part of any V organization, just use the language (and some others). Which is more than I can say for a number of accounts where their profiles clearly say they are directly part of or work for the Zig organization.
