endospore
Joined 7 months ago
Joined 7 months ago
They can't mention what they don't know. And that's the exact reason I'm against this: doing a port without being able to tell what is correct is asking for a disaster, obviously.
I've checked their posts and blogs for a few times, and I'm quite sure they don't know any of these to write about them.
> the 1.4 version has not been released yet
Let's hope the repeated delays (it was scheduled for last week) are not for quality issues, otherwise I'll only be half correct. It appears that all the MIRI errors are not stopping them though. (They have a script to run it but most probably it just fails and they don't care. Personally I'm not executing any of bun's code to avoid summoning nasal demons, so I actually don't know for sure)
> get rid of the unsafe block
Would be possible if they are not disregarding everything else going for numbers. E.g. they are actively increasing the unsafe surface by rewriting some code in SIMD C++ (https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/33032). As if no Rust solutions already exist.
> Still easier than the Zig version
Well, this is true but only realizable if they know how to deal with the new problems emerging during the process. My current conclusion is that they don't.
> ideological
For me it's methodological as explained above.
That being said I've found a case that doesn't do much harm even if it's fixed, and is technically not my contribution. You may take a look at that:
Personally I chose not to disclose my findings in public to avoid this kind of outcome. Having a good laugh with others is not as important as keeping the result of this experiment undisturbed.
This also eliminates the chance of another round of marketing of LLM ability based on actual human contributions and I suggest everyone who is able to analyze the code to do the same - so that they cannot misattribute our ability to LLMs.
I do regret that I've also read the code though, otherwise I'd probably live a little happier with ignorance right now. Sadly as they don't know they don't know about the issues, there's no indication of those in the two public materials they have released.
I personally know 3 categories of newly introduced issues spanning the code base with 200+ occurrences, that leads to undefined behavior and memory issues. Not doing any contributions to the code is my conscious decision, which includes not pointing to the specific problems in public.
It's nice to hear that people are doing the same.
Given that they are investing their time into actually learning the language before diving into this mess. No, unsafe Rust isn't supposed to be something you can handle without prior knowledge.
Jarred was even asking in public how to use traits without runtime overhead during the rewrite. And the blog post phrased it like a normal problem to encounter while doing a million lines port... That's two months after the initial rewrite so you can guess if they learned.
I'd also like to inform you that
- the current success metrics solely consist of their advertisement, my eyes looking at the code strongly suggest otherwise
- the Bun team lacks knowledge to actually make it more idiomatic: none of the Bun team has written any Rust and relying on model knowledge is already proven insufficient.
The release decision itself is presumably driven by that tbh. It's only LGTM from there when nobody knows how to review unsafe Rust.
> must interface with C code that has no safe interface
Yeah so the sane first step is to create encapsulated, safe interface for them, especially in a project like this. Deno for instance have ~0.2x as many unsafes.
And mind you if you haven't read the code, the vast majority of unsafe blocks in bun are for raw pointer access to local (Rust) objects because their ownership was a mess both before and after the rewrite. Also funnily enough a lot of the access patterns are wrong (in the Rust sense), leading to hundreds of new undefined behaviors.
> be honest and reasonable
Well, well. Talking about dishonest and unreasonable behavior, why is bun releasing a new version before solving any of those glaring issues? I'd remind you the current new version is not an improvement compared to the previous one, both in terms of correctness and maintainability.
True.
> has fewer bugs
Nope, this is demonstrably false because Rust has its own invariants around its types and the codebase is violating a lot of them.
> every potential memory issue is neatly annotated by an unsafe block
"Potential memory issue" can originate in unsafe blocks and safe code that are able to alternate the input condition of these unsafe blocks. Guess what? That still counts towards 100% in this code base, hence the abomination remark.
> refactor them out one by one
Not as easy as it sounds. They are like threads in a yarn ball, if there are one or two ends visible it's easier to sort them out. The actual situation is more like we have tens of thousands of ends (all the raw pointer code that comes with every shared object), to fix them it's basically a requirement to unwind the whole thing (rewrite all the callees and reorder the data flow as needed, redesigning all the APIs during that).
It's too early to declare it as anything remotely close to a win, optimistically saying.
For example applying the recover file (well it's a huge pitfall in vim on its own) resets not only the current undo history but also the "persistent" one.