21–30 of 377 posts
I think this is a great example of both points of view in the ongoing debate. Pro-LLM coding agents: look! a working compiler built in a few hours by an agent! this is amazing! Anti-LLM coding agents: it's not a working compiler, though. And it doesn't matter how few hours it took, because it doesn't work. It's useless. Pro: Sure, but we can get the agent to fix that. Anti: Can you, though? We've seen that the more c…
I think this is a great example of both points of view in the ongoing debate. Pro-LLM coding agents: look! a working compiler built in a few hours by an agent! this is amazing! Anti-LLM coding agents: it's not a working compiler, though. And it doesn't matter how few hours it took, because it doesn't work. It's useless. Pro: Sure, but we can get the agent to fix that. Anti: Can you, though? We've seen that the more c…
First, remember when we had LLMs run optimisation passes last year? Alphaevolve doing square packing, and optimising ML kernels? The "anti" crowd was like "well, of course it can automatically optimise some code, that's easy". And things like "wake me up when it does hard tasks". Now, suddenly when they do hard tasks, we're back at "haha, but it's unoptimised and slow, laaame".
Second, if you could take 100 juniors, 100 mid level devs and 100 senior devs, lock them in a room for 2 weeks, how many working solutions that could boot up linux in 2 different arches, and almost boot in the third arch would you get? And could you have the same devs now do it in zig?
The thing that keeps coming up is that the "anti" crowd is fighting their own deamons, and have kinda lost the plot along the way. Every "debate" is about promisses, CEOs, billions, and so on. Meanwhile, at every step of the way these things become better and better. And incredibly useful in the right hands. I find it's best to just ignore the identity folks, and keep on being amazed at the progress. The haters will just find the next goalpost and the next fight with invisible entities. To paraphrase - those who can, do, those who can't, find things to nitpick.
It's really cool to see how slow unoptimised C is. You get so used to seeing C easily beat any other language in performance that you assume it's really just intrinsic to the language. The benchmark shows a SQLite3 unoptimised build 12x slower for CCC, 20x for optimised build. That's enormous! I'm not dissing CCC here, rather I'm impressed with how much speed is squeezed out by GCC out of what is assumed to be alread…
The primatives are directly related to the actual silicon. A function call is actually going to turn into a call instruction (or get inlined). The order of bytes in your struct are how they exist in memory, etc. A pointer being dereferenced is a load/store.
The converse holds as well. Interpreted languages are slow because this association with the hardware isn't the case.
When you have a poopy compiler that does lots of register shuffling then you loose this association.
Specifically the constant spilling with those specific functions functions that were the 1000x slowdown, makes the C code look a lot more like Python code (where every variable is several dereference away).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the typedef problem?
Lexical parsing C is simple, except that typedef's technically make it non-context-free. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexer_hack When handwriting a parser, it's no big deal, but it's often a stumbling block for parser generators or other formal approaches. Though, I recall there's a PEG-based parser for C99/C11 floating around that was supposed to be compliant. But I'm having trouble finding a link, and maybe it…
Then, only the parser needs to be context sensitive, for the A* B; construct which is either a no-op multiplication (if A is a variable) or a variable declaration of a pointer type (if A is a type)
> The compiler did its job fine
> Where CCC Succeeds Correctness: Compiled every C file in the kernel (0 errors)
I don't think that follows. It's entirely possible that the compiler produced garbage assembly for a bunch of the kernel code that would make it totally not work even if it did link. (The SQLite code passing its self tests doesn't convince me otherwise, because the Linux kernel uses way more advanced/low-level/uncommon features than SQLite does.)
I think this is a great example of both points of view in the ongoing debate. Pro-LLM coding agents: look! a working compiler built in a few hours by an agent! this is amazing! Anti-LLM coding agents: it's not a working compiler, though. And it doesn't matter how few hours it took, because it doesn't work. It's useless. Pro: Sure, but we can get the agent to fix that. Anti: Can you, though? We've seen that the more c…
It's really cool to see how slow unoptimised C is. You get so used to seeing C easily beat any other language in performance that you assume it's really just intrinsic to the language. The benchmark shows a SQLite3 unoptimised build 12x slower for CCC, 20x for optimised build. That's enormous! I'm not dissing CCC here, rather I'm impressed with how much speed is squeezed out by GCC out of what is assumed to be alread…
- Old Russian proverb.
I think this is a great example of both points of view in the ongoing debate. Pro-LLM coding agents: look! a working compiler built in a few hours by an agent! this is amazing! Anti-LLM coding agents: it's not a working compiler, though. And it doesn't matter how few hours it took, because it doesn't work. It's useless. Pro: Sure, but we can get the agent to fix that. Anti: Can you, though? We've seen that the more c…
- Ohh look it can [write small function / do a small rocket hop] but it can't [ write a compiler / get to orbit]!
- Ohh look it can [write a toy compiler / get to orbit] but it can't [compile linux / be reusable]
- Ohh look it can [compile linux / get reusable orbital rocket] but it can't [build a compiler that rivals GCC / turn the rockets around fast enough]
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There's no reason to keep building this compiler just to prove this point. But I bet it would catch up real fast to GCC with a fraction of the resources if it was guided by a few compiler engineers in the loop.
We're going to see a lot of disruption come from AI assisted development.