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Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC
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Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC
#42I 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…
Pretty much. It's missing a tiny detail though. One side is demanding we keep giving hundreds of billions to them and at the same time promising the other side's unemployment.
I don't feel that I see this anywhere but if so, I guess I'm in a third camp.
I am "pro" in the sense that I believe that LLM's are making traditional programming obsolete. In fact there isn't any doubt in my mind.
However, I am "anti" in the sense that I am not excited or happy about it at all! And I certainly don't encourage anyone to throw money at accelerating that process.
Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC
#43"Ironically, among the four stages, the compiler (translation to assembly) is the most approachable one for an AI to build. It is mostly about pattern matching and rule application: take C constructs and map them to assembly patterns.
The assembler is harder than it looks. It needs to know the exact binary encoding of every instruction for the target architecture. x86-64 alone has thousands of instruction variants with complex encoding rules (REX prefixes, ModR/M bytes, SIB bytes, displacement sizes). Getting even one bit wrong means the CPU will do something completely unexpected.
The linker is arguably the hardest. It has to handle relocations, symbol resolution across multiple object files, different section types, position-independent code, thread-local storage, dynamic linking and format-specific details of ELF binaries. The Linux kernel linker script alone is hundreds of lines of layout directives that the linker must get exactly right."
I worked on compilers, assemblers and linkers and this is almost exactly backwards
Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC
#44It might be interesting to feed this report in and see what the coding agent swarm can improve on.
Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC
#45mehh
Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC
#46I 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…
Two thoughts here: 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…
First off Alpha Evolve isn't an LLM. No more than a human is a kidney.
Second depends. If you told them to pretrain for writing C compiler however long it takes, I could see a smaller team doing it in a week or two. Keep in mind LLMs pretrain on all OSS including GCC.
> Meanwhile, at every step of the way these things become better and better.
Will they? Or do they just ingest more data and compute?[1] Again, time will tell. But to me this seems more like speed-running into an Idiocracy scenario than a revolution.[2]
I think this will turn out another driverless car situation where last 1% needs 99% of the time. And while it might happen eventually it's going to take extremely long time.
[1] Because we don't have much more computing jumps left, nor will future data be as clean as now.
[2] Why idiocracy?
Because they are polluting their own corpus of data. And by replacing thinking about computers, there will be no one to really stop them.
We'll equalize the human and computer knowledge by making humans less knowledgeable rather than more.
So you end up in an Idiocracy-like scenario where a doctor can't diagnose you, nor can the machine because it was dumbed down by each successive generation, until it resembles a child's toy.
Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC
#47It 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 would cost you twenty thousand dollars to recreate a piece of software that they do not, with a straight face, actually recommend that you use in any capacity beyond as a toy.
[0] I am categorically not talking about anything AI related or anything that is directly a part of their sales funnel. I am talking about a piece of software that just efficiently does something useful. GCC is an example, Everything by voidtools is an example, Wireshark is an example, etc. Claude is not an example.
Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much. It's missing a tiny detail though. One side is demanding we keep giving hundreds of billions to them and at the same time promising the other side's unemployment.
> One side is demanding we keep giving hundreds of billions to them and at the same time promising the other side's unemployment. That's a valid take. The problem is that there are, at this time, so many valid takes that it's hard to determine which are more valid/accurate than the other. FWIW, I think this is more insightful than most of the takes I've seen, which basically amount to "side-1: we're moving to a highe…
I'm on the "higher level of abstraction" side, but that seems to be very much at odds with however Anthropic is defining it. Abstraction is supposed to give you better high-level clarity at the expense of low-level detail. These $20,000 burning, Gas Town-style orchestration matrices do anything but simplify high level concerns. In fact, they seem committed building extremely complex, low-level harnesses of testing and validation and looping cycles around agents upon agents to avoid actually trying to deal with whatever specific problem they are trying to solve.
How do you solve a problem you refuse to define explicitly? We end up with these Goodhart's Law solutions: they hit all of the required goals and declare victory, but completely fail in every reasonable metric that matters. Which I guess is an approach you make when you are selling agents by the token, but I don't see why anyone else is enamored with this approach.
Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC
#49I 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…
> the insane rate of progress
Yeah but the speed of progress can never catch the speed of a moving goalpost!
Re: Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC
#50I 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…
You can be wrong on every step of your approximation and still be right in the aggregate. E.g. order of magnitude estimate, where every step is wrong but mistakes cancel out.
Human crews on Mars is just as far fetched as it ever was. Maybe even farther due to Starlink trying to achieve Kessler syndrome by 2050.