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Comment by gpderetta | Hacker News Reader

> I really don’t know how many developers use Compiler Explorer: we purposefully don’t have the kind of tracking that could tell us. But, it’s at least in the thousands I think

I think this a large underestimate :D

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Why do you say that? I've bookmarked the site but I've never used it. If my code compiles, I'm good. Not many people dig into the assembly to find that extra 1% performance boost. I'm not saying this tool is not useful because it is but how often do you use it?

I seldom use it myself, but I frequently see people sharing compiler explorer snippets to compare generated assembly on discord conversations about LLVM in just about any native language discord (but mainly the Rust official one), which may sound like a rare occasion, but it happens more often than you'd think. My impression is that it is definitely in the thousands, but it being a service that I've only seen used for quick comparisons rather than in-depth analysis, I can't tell whether it is much more than that

While it might have been started to inspect the assembly, these days I mostly see it getting used to share compilable code and test it against multiple compilers.

Sometimes is just a quick way to test minimalist code snipets

The official Discord for Rust alone easily hammers it with hundreds of snippets a week. You just say "?godbolt" + a code block and one of the bots will respond with the assembly. It's incredible for answering quick questions like "huh I wonder if this gets optimized out."

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