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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?

#81

Post by kick »

bakery2k wrote: post #66
sequoia wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a compiler engineer, but I'm willing to venture that the lower bounds of a "competitive salary" for an engineer in silicon valley is somewhere between 200 & 250k. Compiler engineers may make much more, I don't know, but it's unlikely they make less than that. Perhaps that answers your question?

> an engineer in silicon valley Good point. The biggest factor that determines an engineer's salary is location, followed by years of experience. Not whether they work on compilers/embedded/web/whatever.

Not whether they work on compilers/embedded/web/whatever.

Not true! See: salaries for people who know kdb+, that embedded engineers almost always get screwed on comp.

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

#82

Post by aednichols »

ablekh wrote: post #80

I'm curious about whether there is a large skills overlap between engineers working on compilers and embedded DSLs (for the case of external DSLs, such an overlap would IMO be quite significant). By the way, are there any people here (or, perhaps, you could recommend someone) who is very capable and would be interested in doing some potential contract work on a DSL (I'm still pondering about embedded vs. external - o…

I have no specific experience with compilers (I missed the chance to take the class in college due to scheduling conflicts).

My current day job, at a research nonprofit, is working on a system whose behavior is driven by an external DSL. I get to work on the parser/compiler type thing that generates executable units and the interpreter that actually runs them. This is certainly not the “big leagues” as far as compilers are concerned, we’re not executing anything directly on anyone’s CPU, but I do find it tremendously enjoyable.

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

#83

Post by deepnotderp »

logcrater wrote: post #21
deepnotderp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly! We do so :)

Can you elaborate on that please? Like how do they merge together? I am really interested in those two fields

This is as good an overview as any: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.03441.pdf

In general we can afford to treat the problem as a search problem since our kernels are small enough. Here there is a lot of stuff that ML aided stochastic search is amazing at compared to normal compilers and even in some cases human hand optimized assembly (!).

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

#84

Post by ablekh »

aednichols wrote: post #82
ablekh wrote: post #80

I'm curious about whether there is a large skills overlap between engineers working on compilers and embedded DSLs (for the case of external DSLs, such an overlap would IMO be quite significant). By the way, are there any people here (or, perhaps, you could recommend someone) who is very capable and would be interested in doing some potential contract work on a DSL (I'm still pondering about embedded vs. external - o…

I have no specific experience with compilers (I missed the chance to take the class in college due to scheduling conflicts). My current day job, at a research nonprofit, is working on a system whose behavior is driven by an external DSL. I get to work on the parser/compiler type thing that generates executable units and the interpreter that actually runs them. This is certainly not the “big leagues” as far as compile…

Thank you for sharing your experience. Do you use a more or less well-known toolset like MPS or Xtext or it is some kind of a custom framework? Any lessons learned and best practices regarding external DSL design and development?

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

#85

Post by kristianp »

well_said wrote: post #69

Compiler engineer... It is very sad how the engineer term has been corrupted. You are an engineer only if you pass the FE exam and are a registered member of the state association of engineers

I agree, what's wrong with "developer"? I know what engineers do, and devs don't really do the same thing.

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

#86

Post by AareyBaba »

Google234 wrote: post #6

Intel, IBM, Nvidia, Google, Red Hat, and MSFT are all currently hiring complier engineers. Experience with LLVM is probably useful for many of those opportunities. https://us-redhat.icims.com/jobs/75775/software-engineer---l... https://nvidia.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/NVIDIAExternalCareerSit... https://careers.ibm.com/ShowJob/Id/764855/Software-Developer...

AMD https://jobs.amd.com/search/?q=compiler

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

#87

Post by mgaudet »

I have been curating this list [1] for the last little while, and made it public about a month ago.

While not a list or positions as the URL suggests, ands to help remind people that compilers are in way more companies than you think!

[1]: https://github.com/mgaudet/CompilerJobs

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

#88

Post by antoyo »

ltratt wrote: post #14

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 implementa…

Would you consider implementing the first part of the Tiger book as enough expertise to start in the field? This includes, in my case, generating x86-64 assembly and writing a register allocator.

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

#89

Post by pklee »

alexgmcm wrote: post #10
choeger wrote: post #8

IMO, you should forget about compiler engineering as working on the backend of, say, gcc, or llvm. Yes, there are such positions (e.g., intel needs people adapting compilers to new processor instruction sets) but they are few and very specialized. Instead, think about languages in general. There is a myriad of opportunities between the js eco system, JVM and .NET, things like Rust and even low-level languages like LL…

I wonder if the growth of "low-code" will lead to many more well designed domain specific languages. LookML in Looker is one example I can think of - imo it has enabled Looker to solve the self-service data issue much better via a low-code approach than Tableau and Qlikview (both "no-code").

This is absolutely valid. There is a comprehensive analytics platform that I work on where we went from (a litany of) REST services to our own domain language. It not only allowed us to go across databases (Graph / RDF / RDBMS) but even across processing engines (R/Python). This is really where I think the industry should go. I am sure someone will point out there is a great talk by Brian Kernighan on this on youtube.

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

#90

Post by pklee »

pklee wrote: post #89
alexgmcm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the growth of "low-code" will lead to many more well designed domain specific languages. LookML in Looker is one example I can think of - imo it has enabled Looker to solve the self-service data issue much better via a low-code approach than Tableau and Qlikview (both "no-code").

This is absolutely valid. There is a comprehensive analytics platform that I work on where we went from (a litany of) REST services to our own domain language. It not only allowed us to go across databases (Graph / RDF / RDBMS) but even across processing engines (R/Python). This is really where I think the industry should go. I am sure someone will point out there is a great talk by Brian Kernighan on this on youtube…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg4U4r_AgJU
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