The tech internet is reacting exactly how you would expect to the news that Bun has merged a near-total rewrite from Zig into Rust. Most of the Rust crowd is out in full force celebrating it as another big win for their side. They are already writing off Zig as some niche language that is not built for the future.
They are missing the point.
This is not cope. This is not some Zig fanboy rant. It is a realistic look at a very risky engineering decision with real consequences for the people who actually have to ship and maintain this thing.
The Gamble
Anthropic bought Bun in December 2025. The exact amount they paid is still unknown. Speculation ranges from a lowball one million dollars all the way up to around one hundred million. We do know Bun had raised roughly twenty six million before the acquisition. That is a serious amount of money for a JavaScript runtime, but it is basically nothing to a company valued at three hundred and eighty billion dollars.
Even if they paid the full one hundred million, it would be like you or me walking around with one thousand dollars in our bank account and buying a pack of gum or a cup of coffee. Not exactly a dangerous bet for Anthropic.
The online crowd is acting like this rewrite is already a guaranteed success just because they switched to Rust. In reality this is a high-stakes gamble, mostly for the Bun team. They are the ones whose reputation is on the line if things go wrong.
Four Possible Outcomes
Scenario A: It Actually Works
The translated Rust code ends up fast enough and mostly stable. Anthropic gets to show it off as proof that their AI can rewrite large systems code. Bun ends up with the same product they already had, just written in a different language.
Even in this best case there is a catch. Early checks on the Rust port showed over thirteen thousand unsafe blocks because the AI just carried over the old Zig pointer style. The Rust community might end up doing a bunch of unpaid cleanup work on the messy generated code. So even if it ships, it could still be a weird Frankenstein project under the hood.
Scenario B: Flaky and Unreliable
The runtime mostly runs but has weird regressions, random panics, and edge cases that tests did not catch. Anthropic will probably downplay it and call it progress. For the Bun team this would be painful. A lot of people picked Bun specifically because it promised incredible performance. If that trust breaks, many will quietly switch back to Node or Deno and never look back.
Scenario C: Total Disaster
The new codebase has serious bugs that break production apps for users. Upgrades become a nightmare. Anthropic takes a small hit to their image but keeps running their main business without much trouble. How ever bun as a product might no longer really exists after such an event. Once trust is gone in the JavaScript runtime space it is very hard to get it back. The project could slowly fade into irrelevance.
Scenario D: It Works But Becomes Maintenance Hell
This is the one a lot of people are not talking about. The code compiles, passes the tests, and mostly works in production. But the generated Rust is ugly, hard to read, and full of weird patterns that no human would write. Over time it becomes much more painful to maintain and extend than the old Zig version ever was.
New features take longer, bugs are harder to track down, and the original Bun team ends up spending most of their time fighting the codebase instead of improving the runtime. Users get slower progress and the project loses momentum even if nothing catastrophic happens. This is probably the most likely middle-ground outcome.
Outcome Breakdown
| Scenario | Anthropic Result | Bun Team Result |
|---|---|---|
| Clean Success | Big Win | Break-even |
| Flaky and Unreliable | Small Win | Loss |
| Total Disaster | No Real Damage | Horrible Loss |
| Works But Maintenance Hell | Minor Win | Slow Pain / Stagnation |
What Did Zig Actually Lose?
Pretty much nothing important.
They lost a corporate sponsor check and a team that never really fit the Zig way of doing things.
Zig is about taking it easy, moving carefully, and doing the work right. It is built for patient craftsmanship. The Bun team was running on a completely different mindset. They operated in full hype mode, rushing everything out to feed the JavaScript ecosystem’s demand for speed.
That constant rush led to a lot of breakage. Instead of owning it, they blamed Zig. They pointed at the pre-1.0 compiler and breaking changes as the reason their runtime kept feeling unstable. They even forked the language and tried forcing lifetimes and heavy AI patches into it, trying to turn Zig into something it was never meant to be.
Ditching that mismatch is probably a relief for the Zig project.
But the real gift is what comes next. Anthropic just paid for the cleanest before-and-after comparison the Zig community could ever ask for. We had Bun running on Zig for years. That was the before. Now we have the exact same codebase, same architecture, and same team running on a machine-translated Rust version. That is the after.
No more excuses. No more arguing about pre-1.0 volatility or breaking changes. All the variables are removed. The Zig community now gets to watch what happens in plain sight.
If Bun suddenly becomes rock solid and reliable, then maybe Zig really was holding it back. But if the flakiness, regressions, and instability follow it into Rust anyway, that will be very telling.
Zig didn’t lose its flagship project. It let a multi-billion-dollar company pay for the crash test.
