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Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

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Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#371

Post by DauntingPear7 »

yc-kraln wrote: post #234

It's really difficult for me to understand the level of cynicism in the HN comments on this topic, at all. The amount of goalpost-moving and redefining is absolutely absurd. I really get the impression that the majority of the HN comments are just people whining about sour grapes, with very little value added to the discussion. I'd like to see someone disagree with the following: Building a C compiler, targeting thre…

Someone will have to know how to steer the LLM to fix/update/maintain the bespoke software they decided to use, so still a large cost there

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#372

Post by hulitu »

vidarh wrote: post #311
jrflowers wrote: post #47

It seems like if Anthropic released a super cool and useful _free_ utility (like a compiler, for example) that was better than existing counterparts or solved a problem that hadn’t been solved before[0] and just casually said “Here is this awesome thing that you should use every day. By the way our language model made this.” it would be incredible advertising for them. But they instead made a blog post about how it w…

They made a blog post about it because it's an amazing test of the abilities of the models to deliver a working C-compiler, even with lots of bugs and serious caveats, for $20k of tokens, without a human babysitting it. I'd challenge anyone who are negative to this to try to achieve what they did by hand, with the same restrictions (e.g. generating full SSA form instead of just directly emitting code, capable of comp…

> it's an amazing test of the abilities of the models to deliver a working C-compiler, even with lots of bugs and serious caveats,

if I deliver my work with lots of bugs and serious caveats, I will be sacked. Streching the definition of "working", especially in times where code quality is going down, does not help.

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#373

Post by [deleted] »

bgirard wrote: post #30
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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#374

Post by hulitu »

tjr wrote: post #105
jrflowers wrote: post #47

It seems like if Anthropic released a super cool and useful _free_ utility (like a compiler, for example) that was better than existing counterparts or solved a problem that hadn’t been solved before[0] and just casually said “Here is this awesome thing that you should use every day. By the way our language model made this.” it would be incredible advertising for them. But they instead made a blog post about how it w…

I wonder how much more it would take Anthropic to make CCC on par with, or even better than, GCC.

At the current state of AI, some centuries.

As far as I underestand from the comments, Anthropic released a "compiler" that translates C code to some assembly, which might or might not be valid input for a linker.

They claimed they were able to compile the Linux kernel (which version ? which config) and boot it (was the boot successfull ? were all devices correctly initialized ? Is userland running without problems ?)

At the moment it really looks like a political farce with no real outcome except some promisses.

Is there a code repository so i can test it ?

What is the licence of this compiler ?

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#375

Post by hulitu »

bsaul wrote: post #178

One missing analysis, that IMHO is the most important right now , is : what is the quality of the generated code ? Having LLM generates a first complete iteration of a C compiler in rust is super useful if the code is of good enough quality that it can be maintained and improved by humans (or other AIs). It is (almost) completely useless otherwise. And that is the case for most of today's code generated by AIs. Most…

> what is the quality of the generated code ?

It seems to run.

Testing will be implemented in another release.

Looking at Readme.md it downloads a particular kernel version with a particular busybox version and runs them in qemu.

A parody.

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#376

Post by hulitu »

tcper wrote: post #218

I curious, maybe AI learn too much code from human writed compilers. What if invent a fresh new language, and let AI write the compiler, if the compiler works well I think that is the true intelligent.

> maybe AI learn too much code from human writed compilers

This was the aim. The reality is far away from it.

Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

#377

Post by flexagoon »

xigoi wrote: post #268
flexagoon wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I expect within the next ~2 years AI tools will produce a better compiler than gcc. Building a "better compiler than gcc" is a matter of cutting-age scientific research, not of being able to write good code

Given that GCC is in the training data, it should not take much research to create an equally good compiler.

If reproducing data from the training set counts, then creating an equally good compiler is a matter of running `git clone` :D
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