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Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

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Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#221

Post by IshKebab »

josephcsible wrote: post #26

> the build failed at the linker stage > 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 Li…

Yeah I saw a post on LinkedIn (can't find it again sorry) where they found that CCC compiles C by mostly just ignoring errors. `const` is a nop. It doesn't care if you redefine variables with different types, use a string where an `int` is expected, etc.

Whenever I've done optimisation (e.g. genetic algorithms / simulated annealing) before you always have to be super careful about your objective function because the optimisation will always come up with some sneaky lazy way to satisfy it that you didn't think of. I guess this is similar - their objective was to compile valid C code and pass some tests. They totally forgot about not compiling invalid code.

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#222

Post by kaycey2022 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #8

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…

Maybe Anthropic can sponsor a research team to polish this using just an agent. A lot of things can be learned from that exercise.

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#223

Post by lelanthran »

aurareturn wrote: post #98
rk06 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Anti, my argument is "if AI will good in future, then come back in the future"

As a pro, my argument is "it's good enough now to make me incredibly productive, and it's only going to keep getting better because of advancements in compute". I'd rather get really good at leveraging AI now than to bury my head in the sand hoping this will go away. I happen to agree with the saying that AI isn't going to replace people, but people using AI will replace people who don't. So by the time you come back…

> I'd rather get really good at leveraging AI now than to bury my head in the sand hoping this will go away.

I don't think those are the only two options, though.

Further, "Getting really good at leveraging AI" is very different to "Getting really good at prompting LLMs".

One is a skill that might not even result in the AI providing any code. The other is a "skill" in much the same way as winning hotdog eating contests is a "skill".

In the latter, even the least-technical user can replace you once they get even halfway decent at min-maxing their agent's input (md files, although I expect we'll switch away from that soon enough to a cohesive and structured UI).

In the former, you had better find some really difficult problems that pay when you solve them.

Either way, I predict a lot of pain and anguish in the near future, for a lot of people. Especially those who expect that prompting skills are an actual "skill".

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#224

Post by IshKebab »

tyre wrote: post #78

As a neutral observation: it’s remarkable how quickly we as humans adjust expectations. Imagine five years ago saying that you could have a general purpose AI write a c compiler that can handle the Linux kernel, by itself, from scratch for $20k by writing a simple English prompt. That would have been completely unbelievable! Absurd! No one would take it seriously. And now look at where we are.

I totally agree, but I think a lot of the push-back is that this is presented as better than it actually is.

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#225

Post by NitpickLawyer »

Ygg2 wrote: post #115
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First off Alpha Evolve isn't an LLM. It's a system based on LLMs. > AlphaEvolve, an evolutionary coding agent powered by large language models for general-purpose algorithm discovery and optimization. AlphaEvolve pairs the creative problem-solving capabilities of our Gemini models with automated evaluators that verify answers, and uses an evolutionary framework to improve upon the most promising ideas. > AlphaEvolv…

> It's a system based on LLMs. What you said is: > First, remember when we had LLMs run optimisation passes last year? Alphaevolve doing square packing If I start a sentence: First, remember the fish intelligence competition last year? Rossie jumped through a hula hoop. I, and other readers (probably), would think Rossie is a fish. Not a dog. Even if you can technically group dogs as a sort of fish descendant.

I have no idea what you're arguing. Alphaevolve is similar to claude code. They are using LLMs in a harness. No idea what you mean with fish, kidneys and so on. Can you please stick to the technical stuff? Otherwise it's just noise.

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#226

Post by fc417fc802 »

mawadev wrote: post #189
tyre wrote: post #78

As a neutral observation: it’s remarkable how quickly we as humans adjust expectations. Imagine five years ago saying that you could have a general purpose AI write a c compiler that can handle the Linux kernel, by itself, from scratch for $20k by writing a simple English prompt. That would have been completely unbelievable! Absurd! No one would take it seriously. And now look at where we are.

Now consider how much of the original C compiler's source code it was trained on and still managed to output a worse result?

Proof of just how lossy the compression is.

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#227

Post by bombolo »

Rapzid wrote: post #103
wrxd wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thing has likely all of GCC, clang and any other open source C compiler in its training set. It could have spotted out GCC source code verbatim and matched its performance.

It's kinda of a failure it didn't just spit out GCC isn't it? If I had GCC and was asked for a C compiler I would just provide GCC..

[dead]

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#228

Post by NitpickLawyer »

christoph wrote: post #199
AstroBen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're heavily implying that because it can do this task, it can do any task at this difficulty or lower. Wrong. This thing isn't a human at the level of writing a compiler, and shouldn't be compared to one Codex frustratingly failed at refactoring my tests for me the other day, despite me trying many, many prompts of increasing specificity. A task a junior could've done Am I saying "haha it couldn't do a junior leve…

Adopt this half baked, half broken, insanely expensive, planet destroying, IP infringing tech, you have no choice. Burn everything, because if you don’t, you will get left behind and, maybe, just maybe, in 2 years when it’s good enough, maybe… after hoovering up all the money, IP and domain expertise for free, and you’ve burnt all your money & sanity prompting and cajoling it to a semi working solution for a problem…

> 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

perfect example

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#229

Post by tossandthrow »

usrusr wrote: post #209
tossandthrow wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ai legal analysis seemed to be the nail in the coffin. Adding Ai generated comments are IMHO some of the most rude uses of Ai.

Not sure what exactly you're referring to, but legal is a very interesting field to observe, right? I've been wondering about that since quite early in my LLM awareness: A slightly sarcastic (or perhaps not so slightly..) mental model of legal conflict resolution is that much of it boils down to throwing lots of content at the opposing side, claiming that it shows that the represented side is right and creating a tas…

Ah, sorry. I am not referring to using LLMs for legal work.

I am referring to the act of merely pasting the output of a model as a comment.

Have the decency to understand what the LLM is writing and write your own message.

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#230

Post by mdavid626 »

pertymcpert wrote: post #193
mdavid626 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling, you didn't look at the code at all.

I have a feeling that you didn't because if you had, you'd realize it has more similarity to llvm than gcc.

Not sure who are you replying to. But me, personally, never said anything about gcc, nor llvm.
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