Hacker News Reader

Comment by tester756 | Hacker News Reader

>A compiler almost never produces a wrong output

back log of compiler's bugs can be pretty large

In a production-grade compiler like LLVM they are rare enough that it compiles giant projects like Linux and Chromium without detectable issues.

Maybe eventually Claude can, since it can write tests, but compilers / (deductive) algorithms have other advantages like efficiency and predictability.

>In a production-grade compiler like LLVM they are rare enough that it compiles giant projects like Linux and Chromium without detectable issues.

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues

Yea, sure, but there's waay more than Linux or Chromium

I guess we can come back in 20 years and see if Claude is as reliable as LLVM is today. That would give a comparison between similar aged products.

Not really. As the C language was created around 1972 and by 1973, Unix was rewritten in it. By 1975, Unix was released commercially. That’s like 3 years between design and commercial usage.

Have a go at writing something in 1975's C.

x=-5 Is not x = -5

There's no unsigned int.

It's a better comparison to the usability of Claude than you might think. It's doable, but hardly ideal.

we could make a similar observation about determinism. given a set of inputs, the compiler will create the same output each time.

not always true. but very close (pathological coding defects and explicit randomization excluded)

very different than an LLM.

> almost never

But not never. "Almost" is doing a lot of work there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com