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Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

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Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#271

Post by sylware »

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…

You are missing the most important:

"Pro": give me tons of money to keep going this endeavour.

More seriously: if some LLM or other can _assist_ c++ to plain and simple C port...

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#272

Post by m4rtink »

eb08a167 wrote: post #219
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone told you 5 years ago that a computer generated a working C compiler, would you think it was a big deal or not?

A computer generating a compiler is nothing new. Unzip has done this many many times. The key difference is that unzip extracts data from an archive in a deterministic way, while LLMs recover data from the training dataset using a lossy statistical model. Aid that with a feedback loop and a rich test suite, and you get exactly what Anthropic has achieved. While I agree that the technology behind this is impressive, t…

Its already bad enough people are using non-GPL compilers like LLVM (that make malicious behavior like proprietary incompatible forks possible), so yet another compiler not-under GPL, that even AI-washes GPL code, is not a good thing.

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#273

Post by codethief »

AstroBen wrote: post #161
simianwords wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure then make your prediction? It’s always easy to hand wave and dismiss other people’s predictions. But make yours: what do you think llms can do in 2 years?

You're asking me to do the thing I just said was frustrating haha. I have no idea. It's a new technology and we have nothing to draw from to make predictions. But for the sake of fun.. New code generation / modification I think we're hitting a point of diminishing returns and they're not going to improve much here The limitation is fundamentally that they can only be as good as the detail in the specs given, or the t…

> If you make the specs detailed enough so that there's no misunderstanding possible: you've just written code, what we already do today

This was my opinion for a very long time. Having build a few applications from scratch using AI, though, nowadays I think: Sometimes not everything needs to be spelled out. Like in math papers some details can be left to the ~~reader~~LLM and it'll be fine.

I mean, in many cases it doesn't really matter what exactly the code looks like, as long as it ends up doing the right thing. For a given Turing machine, the equivalence class of equivalent implementations is infinite. If a short spec written in English leads the LLM to identify the correct equivalence class, that's all we need and, in fact, a very impressive compression result.

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#274

Post by a1o »

benreesman wrote: post #116
bgirard wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This to me sounds a lot like the SpaceX conversation: - 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] - T…

AI assist in software engineering is unambiguously demonstrated to some done degree at this point: the "no LLM output in my project" stance is cope. But "reliable, durable, scalable outcomes in adversarial real-world scenarios" is not convincingly demonstrated in public, the asterisks are load bearing as GPT 5.2 Pro would say. That game is still on, and AI assist beyond FIM is still premature for safety critical or g…

What is FIM ?

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#275

Post by aurareturn »

layer8 wrote: post #270
aurareturn wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I can keep my job now so I can pay for compute in the future when I'm out of a job. The compute will be used to create my own business to make money.

What makes you think you’ll be able to out-compete the purely-AI-led businesses with your business? What skills will give you an edge in the business that won’t also give you an edge in the job?

Maybe I can't. But that's also why I'm invested into AI companies right now.

Plan:

1. Keep my job for as long as I can by leveraging current AI tools to the best of my ability while my non-AI user colleagues lose earnings power or their job

2. Invest my money into AI companies and/or S&P500

3. If I'm truly rendered useless, live off of the investment

You got any better ideas? How would you do this?

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#276

Post by a1o »

delaminator wrote: post #231
bgirard wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This to me sounds a lot like the SpaceX conversation: - 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] - T…

In 1908 the Model T could do 45mph. In 1935 the Auburn 851 S/C Speedster hit 100mph In 1955 the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing did 161mph In 2025 the Yangwang U9 Xtreme hit 308mph progress is a decaying exponential - Tsiolkovsky's tyranny

These specific points look like a line if you plot

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#277

Post by xigoi »

wrxd wrote: post #92
o175 wrote: post #53

The 158,000x slowdown on SQLite is the number that matters here, not whether it can parse C correctly. Parsing is the solved problem — every CS undergrad writes a recursive descent parser. The interesting (and hard) parts of a compiler are register allocation, instruction selection, and optimization passes, and those are exactly where this falls apart. That said, I think the framing of "CCC vs GCC" is wrong. GCC has…

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.

That’s the equivalent of getting less than 50% on a quiz consisting entirely of yes/no questions.

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#279

Post by layer8 »

aurareturn wrote: post #275
layer8 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think you’ll be able to out-compete the purely-AI-led businesses with your business? What skills will give you an edge in the business that won’t also give you an edge in the job?

Maybe I can't. But that's also why I'm invested into AI companies right now. Plan: 1. Keep my job for as long as I can by leveraging current AI tools to the best of my ability while my non-AI user colleagues lose earnings power or their job 2. Invest my money into AI companies and/or S&P500 3. If I'm truly rendered useless, live off of the investment You got any better ideas? How would you do this?

I believe that I’ll keep enough of an edge in my job that I’ll continue to be employed. (At present I still have zero pressure to use AI, though I do use it.) It’s of course possible for that to turn out to be wrong, but in that case I also see no chance to start a business, and society will be in a lot of trouble.

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#280

Post by 201984 »

IshKebab wrote: post #221
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…

>They totally forgot about not compiling invalid code.

Indeed. For a specific example of it not erroring out:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Compilers/comments/1qx7b12/comment/...

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