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Comment by burnte | Hacker News Reader

I have yet to hear any evidence that the Rust rewrite was harmful. I have no emotional investment in Bun (which I'd never heard of before the rewrite), or Zig (which I also didn't know about), or Rust (which I think is neat and that's about it), so I'm about as unbiased as you can get and from what I saw the conversion was done well, and I haven't heard of massive bugs resulting from the rewrite.

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It is probably fine, it is kind of a best case scenario: porting a good code base with lots of unit tests, all hand-written. Not much can go wrong here as the LLM is kept in check by the original code, the tests, and the fact that the topic (a JS engine) is well documented.

The problem is what comes next. They now have code that they don't understand, and they are likely to work on it with AI in the future, but the new features they may introduce later will not have the luxury of hand-written tests and a reference code. So, unless they undertake the massive effort needed to fully understand the Rust code and deal with all these "unsafe", quality is very likely to go down, Microslop style.

It’s always been a fallacy to think that large organizations have code which is understood. There are people somewhere understanding small parts up until the next round of layoffs.

Millions were invested in this project where they fired the expensive experts (me included) and replaced with a small army of cheap devs (which was actually more expensive and less productive than just retaining even one of the experts would have been). Couple years later the inevitable happened and the whole thing was thrown into trash. Code without anyone who understands it is just a liability.

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