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Comment by falloutx | Hacker News Reader

So it copied one of the C compilers? This was always possible but now you need to pay $1000 in API costs to Anthropic

It wrote the compiler in Rust. As far as I know, there aren't any Rust based C compilers with the same capabilities. If you can find one that can compile the Linux kernel or get 99% on the GCC torture test suite, I would be quite surprised. I couldn't in a search.

Maybe read the article before being so dismissive.

Why does language of the compiler matter? Its a solved problem and since other implementations are already available anyone can already transpile them to rust.

Direct transpilation would create a ton of unsafe code (this repo doesn't have any) and fixing that would require a lot of manual fixes from the model. Even that would be a massive achievement, but it's not how this was created.

They are trained pretty hard to transpile the code between languages and do this pretty well because this can be done using RL.

You can force the agent not to use unsafe, this is why it burned $20000. Thousands of attempts against good tests with good boundaries set.

> As far as I know, there aren't any Rust based C compilers with the same capabilities.

If you trained on a neutral representation like an AST or IR, then the source language shouldn't matter. *

* I'm not familiar with how Anthropic builds their models, but training this way should nullify PL differences.

LLMs do not learn concepts perfectly across programming languages, just as they don't learn concepts perfectly across human languages.

Add a 0 and double it

|Over nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and $20,000 in API cost

One more reason RAM prices will continue to go up.

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