Zig creator Andrew Kelley disputes Bun's Rust-rewrite account

Category: Pulse
Status: discussion
Sources: Andrew Kelley post, HN discussion
Summary: Andrew Kelley, the creator of Zig, published a response on 2026-07-08 to Bun's account of rewriting its runtime from Zig to Rust, covered in Top stories. He argues that language choice was not the main driver of the reported gains. He says Zig supported link-time optimization throughout Bun's use of it but Bun kept it disabled over LLVM bugs that affect Rust too, that Zig ships tooling to audit comptime and inline usage that Bun did not use, and that removing memory-safety bugs is primarily a matter of dedicating engineering effort rather than switching languages. He also disputes a claim in the Bun post about fuzzing, calling it a fabrication, and criticizes an influx of low-quality AI-driven contributions to Zig. These are one maintainer's assertions and are not independently verified.
Why it matters: The Zig author's rebuttal is the counterweight to a widely shared rewrite narrative, and it reframes the reported improvements as configuration and effort rather than an inherent property of Rust.