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Ask HN: Are compiler engineers still in demand, and what do they work on?

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Re: Ask HN: Are compiler engineers still in demand, and what do they work on?

#11

Post by AndrewDucker »

peglasaurus wrote: post #5

What qualifies someone to be a Compiler Engineer? Compsci degree? Working compilers? Opensource commits? Github repo full of parsers?

The ability to help deliver better compilers.

How you demonstrate that can be in a variety of ways. Any of those would probably be helpful if you can get the right person to notice them.

Re: Ask HN: Are compiler engineers still in demand, and what do they work on?

#14

Post by ltratt »

I lead a PL/VMs/compilers research group and the number of organisations interested in hiring people in this area keeps growing and growing. Now, that's not to say that there are ever going to be hundreds of thousands people working in this field, but it turns out that lots of organisations have realised they have pressing language needs. It varies all the way from those wanting to make mainstream language implementations perform better on their codebases to those wanting to reimplement a major internal language in a modern fashion.

At the moment -- and I expect for the foreseeable future -- demand quite significantly outstrips supply. Because of that, organisations are often quite flexible in how they view potential hires in this area. Simplifying a bit, there are two main ways to get in to the field: obtain specific training in the field (e.g. a PhD); start / contribute to a project (not necessarily OSS) that shows expertise (e.g. if you start filing high quality PRs against Rust or LLVM, people will fairly quickly realise you know what you're doing).

Best of luck -- it's a really fun field, with lots of interesting challenges, and a good group of people!

Re: Ask HN: Are compiler engineers still in demand, and what do they work on?

#15

Post by logcrater »

tgma wrote: post #9

There has been a resurgence due to the proliferation of more special-purpose processors, like Google TPU or Tesla FSD. I anticipate this trend to continue due to Moore's Law slowdown. However, if you're not really into this, there's no reason to not pursue some other subset as on a relative basis, higher levels of the stack likely will have many more opportunities than infrastructure.

Is there a way I can integrate Machine Learning to Compiler stuff? I've been meddling with ml for a while and it's pretty interesting too.

Re: Ask HN: Are compiler engineers still in demand, and what do they work on?

#17

Post by randomthrow4w4y »

I work at Oracle Labs where GraalVM (graalvm.org) is being developed. I think this is one of the most exciting places to be right now for compiler engineers, and people with the right skills are certainly in demand. Some things that came out of this: partial escape analysis, the Graal JIT compiler, SubstrateVM, native-image, several Truffle language implementations (JS, Ruby, Python, LLVM), IGV for visualizing different layers of IRs, integrating GraalVM in the Oracle Database (MLE).

Re: Ask HN: Are compiler engineers still in demand, and what do they work on?

#19

Post by deepnotderp »

logcrater wrote: post #15
tgma wrote: post #9

There has been a resurgence due to the proliferation of more special-purpose processors, like Google TPU or Tesla FSD. I anticipate this trend to continue due to Moore's Law slowdown. However, if you're not really into this, there's no reason to not pursue some other subset as on a relative basis, higher levels of the stack likely will have many more opportunities than infrastructure.

Is there a way I can integrate Machine Learning to Compiler stuff? I've been meddling with ml for a while and it's pretty interesting too.

Certainly! We do so :)
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