I audited several postinstall scripts recently in popular packages. They seem to be mostly around using native binaries, downloading them, detecting if the platform is compatible, linking to it directly instead of having it bootstrapped by node, working around issues in older versions of npm, etc. Since dev toolchains (e.g. esbuild) are now being built in compiled languages and distributed as binaries via npm registry. If you are on a recent version of node/npm and a common/recent OS/platform, you should be able to disable all the postinstall scripts without legitimate issue.
Merging a complete rewrite in another language in 9 days seems insane to me. Maybe I'm just too cautious but with something like this I'd split off as a separate binary and get some heavy use customers involved as testers first to see if it causes any unforeseen problems before slowly expanding it out.
I'd want to be pretty damn confident it won't cause any regressions before sunsetting the original codebase in favor of this one.
I don’t think you’re too cautious. Big upgrades and rewrites is somewhat of a „work hobby” of mine and this seems waaay too fast. I don’t know how the Bun canary process works and I guess their test suite is better than typical projects but still… I can’t imagine this working out well without testing it on a variety of big projects for a significant amount of time.
There’s probably loads(?) of observable behaviors that people rely on, consciously or not. Even _if_ the new thing is 100% spec compliant, it might still be breaking or otherwise problematic for heavy users.
That said, I’d love to be proven wrong. I use Bun from time to time on small stuff and I enjoy it, so I wish them well (:
I thought for sure the peanut gallery was overreacting. Especially when the concern was absurd - because who would do such an insance thing? Like, at the time I legitimately thought 'no way a project switches over in a few months'. Even as an absurd hypothetical, I couldn't even imagine the prospect of it being done in a matter of days.
It seems it was an experiment at that moment, and that it went well? I do hope they release it under 2.x though, cannot imagine how a 1M LoC can break in so many ways, especially if what xiphias says is true:
If I got magically handed the perfect rust rewrite for a project of this magnitude, it would take way longer than 9 days to merge, because I would need to make sure it's actually good.
> it would take way longer than 9 days to merge, because I would need to make sure it's actually good
What if another (unstated) goal of your rewrite was to provide marketing material for how advanced your acquirers AI tools are? The faster the turnaround, the better they (and therefore you) look.
> It seems it was an experiment at that moment, and that it went well?
There’s no way they can know that for sure. A change of this magnitude cannot go from experiment to success in such a short time frame. Even if all the code were 100% correct, you can’t call it a success until it’s battle tested in real world scenarios for a while, and that is impossible without time. Same way you can’t cook properly by throwing food into a vulcano. It’s not just about the temperature.
Either the “experiment” claim was a lie or they are being irresponsible.
I have a friend who get super mad when he fails ">80% chance of success" throws.
This isn't case of this tho. Even he said that there is a high chance of RIIR, 9 days still insanely short time for such rewrite if you're planning to have some sort of community around the project.
You have no idea if it was a lie or not. I routinely have my clanker fleet spend a couple days toiling on some crap that I assume I will throw away, but it turns out pretty awesome, so I keep it.
It's entirely plausible that when that comment was posted, he doubted it would work well enough to keep.
(Sensible default for LLM code, btw. But sometimes it works great.)
Surely the mods will be here to remind you that it's against the rules to direct personal attacks towards other community members, to fulminate and brigade.
Or do those protections only cover whiny open source developers upset about a chat bot writing blogs?
Does anything from that comment say that there was 0% chance the experiment wouldn't be merged into main? I see "very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely", which just means the low chance of it not being thrown out has occurred.
It doesn't say what will happen, but isn't their comment responding to people who don't like the look of this rewrite, and telling them basically that they don't have to think/worry about it? I definitely read it as 'not yet' and not 'another week or so'.
Are my 70 year old parents regular people? They've never had tech jobs, and they figured out how to use AI once I installed ChatGPT on their phone. They provide it pictures, talk to it, and also use text input.
Are the majority of people who don't like / don't use AI not regular people? Definitionally, they are, more so than your parents. Funny how you try to make a general statement but immediately fall back to anecdotes when pressed.
It makes sense when you understand the origins, "libertarian" as a phrase was coopted from socialist-libertarians (now called anarchists), and is full of contradictions and hypocrises, mainly the one you mentioned about private property (in the economic sense of the term), controlling economic organizations as a dictator and owning their collective output as property. Not to mention this type of property is pretty anti-social can only exist with a massive bureaucracy and violence apparatus (courts and cops) which also contradicts their ideology.
I mean, their foundational philosophy is Ayn Rand, a fiction writer? The whole right-libertarian ideology is a joke compared to the intellectual rigor of anarchist theorists like Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, etc.
Especially in a world where the entire global economy is controlled by capitalists, it looks silly and just ends up affirming capitalist rule, like the OP has pointed out.
> I mean, their foundational philosophy is Ayn Rand, a fiction writer? The whole right-libertarian ideology is a joke compared to the intellectual rigor of anarchist theorists like Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, etc.
Ayn Rand is not consensus within libertarian circles.
From the top if my head on the libertarian camp I think of Rothbard, Hayek, Mises, Menger, Von Bawerk who debunked Marx economic policies. Also arguably Kant and Adam Smith and many others who influenced it.
My guess is that since you know Bakunin and these others there might be a chance you are deep into the other extreme. I think it's okay to disagree but your comparison shows you probably need to do better research before putting things together to avoid the "our blessed homeland, their barbarous wastes" situation.
Most right-libertarians will point to Ayn Rand as their philosophical north star. It's the only "philosopher" name mentioned in the OP. It's comical and unserious.
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