Comment by notnullorvoid

Comment by notnullorvoid 9 hours ago

I am more shocked about the origin story compared to the acquisition.

> Almost five years ago, I was building a Minecraft-y voxel game in the browser. The codebase got kind of large, and the iteration cycle time took 45 seconds to test if changes worked. Most of that time was spent waiting for the Next.js dev server to hot reload.

Why in the hell would anyone be using Next.js to make a 3D game... Jarred has always seemed pretty smart, but this makes no sense. He could've saved so much time and avoided building a whole new runtime by simply not using the completely wrong tool for the job.

mayo369 8 hours ago

Maybe same for anthropic, they can simply write agent using Rust/Go. Instead they decide to buy and develop a JavaScript runtime.

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qeternity 22 minutes ago

These are completely different. Agents (aside from the model inference) are not CPU bound. You gain much more by having a wider user base than whatever marginal CPU cycles you would gain in Rust/Go.
Video games are of course a different story.

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nly 2 hours ago

If anything this seems to be a huge victory for Zig, since Bun is mostly written in Zig.

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Aeolun 8 hours ago

> He could've saved so much time and avoided building a whole new runtime by simply not using the completely wrong tool for the job.

True, but where is the fun in that?

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moritonal an hour ago

This take is interesting given we're all here congratulating Jarred for seeing that there was no tool to solve x so made it, and is now enjoying a likely nice payday. Be the change you want to see in the world?

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cyco130 3 hours ago

First time I see it being a net positive that someone didn't know about Vite: Bun wouldn't exist otherwise.

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mock-possum 8 hours ago

Most people use what they know. You start out that way, and if it turns out to be good, you can always do a v2

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notnullorvoid 8 hours ago

Yes, but there are obvious limits to that. This is like someone who knows how to bake wanting to build a car, so they start making it out of dough.

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Tadpole9181 7 hours ago

Because he wanted to? Do you also berate the choices of people in the 4K demo scene for using too little memory?

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johncolanduoni 8 hours ago

He may have been serving a game in a canvas hosted in a Next.js app, but have done all the actual game (rendering, simulation, etc.) in something else. That’s a decent approach - Next can handle the header of the webpage and the marketing blog or whatever just fine.

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komali2 8 hours ago

But like... so can an index.html with a script tag? Am I missing something, where did you read that there was a lot of work involving the header or an attached marketing blog?

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- johncolanduoni 7 hours ago
  
  My point isn’t that you absolutely need that, just that the negative effect on your game development are pretty minimal if you’re not leaning on the SPA framework for anything related to the game. If your game is going to be embedded into an otherwise normal-ish website, this isn’t a terrible way to go (I’ve done it personally with a game mostly written in Rust and compiled to WASM). You can get gains by splitting your game and web site bundles and loading the former from the latter explicitly, but they’re not massive if your bundler was already reasonably incremental (or was already esbuild).
  Thanks for assuming I “read” about bundlers somewhere, though. I’ve been using (and configuring) them since they existed.
  
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  komali2 5 hours ago
  
  I meant specifically was there something I was missing about the Bun developer's game that required a complicated header and thus next.js.
  
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- shortrounddev2 8 hours ago
  
  index.html with script files would still benefit from a bundler. You can have a very minimal react footprint and still want to use react build tools just for bundling.
  
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  komali2 8 hours ago
  
  Sure, but I'm more confused about the next.js usage than I am about the bundler. The bundler makes sense.
  
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