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Comment by dmitrygr | Hacker News Reader

> The generated code is not very efficient. Even with all optimizations enabled, it outputs less efficient code than GCC with all optimizations disabled.

Worse than "-O0" takes skill...

So then, it produced something much worse than tcc (which is better than gcc -O0), an equivalent of which one man can produce in under two weeks. So even all those tokens and dollars did not equal one man's week of work.

Except the one man might explain such arbitrary and shitty code as this:

https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/blob/main/s...

why x9? who knows?!

Oh god the more i look at this code the happier I get. I can already feel the contracts coming to fix LLM slop like this when any company who takes this seriously needs it maintained and cannot...

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I'm trying to recall a quote. Some war where all defeats were censored in the news, possibly Paris was losing to someone. It was something along the lines of "I can't help but notice how our great victories keep getting closer to home".

Last year I tried using an LLM to make a joke language, I couldn't even compile the compiler the source code was so bad. Before Christmas, same joke language, a previous version of Claude gave me something that worked. I wouldn't call it "good", it was a joke language, but it did work.

So it sucks at writing a compiler? Yay. The gloriously indefatigable human mind wins another battle against the mediocre AI, but I can't help but notice how the battles keep getting closer to home.

> but I can't help but notice how the battles keep getting closer to home

This has been true for all of (known) human history. I’m gonna go ahead and make another bold prediction: tech will keep getting better.

The issue with this blog post is it’s mostly marketing.

Can one man really make a C compiler in one week that can compile linux, sqlite, etc.?

Maybe I'm underestimating the simplicity of the C language, but that doesn't sound very plausible to me.

yes, if you do not care to optimize, yes. source: done it

I would love to see the commit log on this.

did this before i knew how to git, back in college. target was ARMv5

Great. Did your compiler support three different architectures (four, if you include x86 in addition to x86-64) and compile and pass the test suite for all of this software?

> Projects that compile and pass their test suites include PostgreSQL (all 237 regression tests), SQLite, QuickJS, zlib, Lua, libsodium, libpng, jq, libjpeg-turbo, mbedTLS, libuv, Redis, libffi, musl, TCC, and DOOM — all using the fully standalone assembler and linker with no external toolchain. Over 150 additional projects have also been built successfully, including FFmpeg (all 7331 FATE checkasm tests on x86-64 and AArch64), GNU coreutils, Busybox, CPython, QEMU, and LuaJIT.

Writing a C compiler is not that difficult, I agree. Writing a C compiler that can compile a significant amount of real software across multiple architectures? That's significantly more non-trivial.

Frankly, I think you are exaggerating. My university had a course that required students to build a C compiler that could run the C subset of SPECint (which includes frigging Perl) and this was the usual 3 month class that was not expected to fill in 24h of your time, so I'd say 1 week sounds perfectly reasonable for someone already familiar. Good enough C for a shitton of projects is barely more complicated than writing an assembler, in fact, that is one of C's strong points (which is also the source of most of its weaknesses).

I really, really don't think so, but you're welcome to try :-)

Implementing just enough to conform to a language is not as difficult as it seems. Making it fast is hard.

> I can already feel the contracts coming to fix LLM slop

First, the agents will attempt to fix issues on their own. Most easy problems will be fixed or worked-around in this manner. The hard problems will require a deeper causal model of how things work. For these, the agents will give up. But, the code-base has evolved to a point where no-one understands whats going on including the agents and its human handlers. Expect your phone to ring at that point, and prepare to ask for a ransom.

Claude is only a few years old so we should compare it to a 3 year old human's C compiler

Claude contains the entire wisdom of the internet, such as it is.

Claude requires many lifetimes worth of data to "learn". Evolution aside humans don't require much data to learn, and our learning happens in real-time in response to our environment.

Train Claude without the programming dataset and give it a dozen of the best programming books, it'll have no chance of writing a compiler. Do the same for a human with an interest in learning to program and there's a good chance.

> I can already feel the contracts coming to fix LLM slop like this when any company who takes this seriously needs it maintained and cannot

Honest question, do you think it’d be easier to fix or rewrite from scratch? With domains I’m intimately familiar with, I’ve come very close to simply throwing the LLM code out after using it to establish some key test cases.

Rewrite is what I’ve been doing so far in such cases. Takes fewer hours

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