7 ms·

Graydon Hoare: 21 compilers and 3 orders of magnitude in 60 minutes

205 points by eternalban 4y ago

eternalban 4y ago
Some items of interest mentioned in the talk: SRI-ARC: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/finding-aids/102706170-SRI/102706170-SRI.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/fi... Frances Allen (RIP): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24066832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24066832
kragen 4y ago
For those who aren't aware, in addition to inventing Rust, Graydon also wrote Monotone, the source control system whose internal design Git is based on. Interpersonally he can be prickly sometimes but his opinions are well worth listening to.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  Oh I had no clue he was behind monotone nor git's lifting it. Have you both collaborated on something ?
  - zoltar 4y ago
    Linus was hanging out in the monotone list for a bit and was a little frustrated with the performance at the time. https://lwn.net/Articles/132161/ https://lwn.net/Articles/132161/
    - agumonkey 4y ago
      interesting bit of history also reread about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_(software) it's funny how like a few other projects, the original high level interface (cogito) got canned and the low level one ended up the main. I've read this about apt (which was a sub project of a big debian graphical package management) and lisp too.
- everybodyknows 4y ago
  Also the core code (in C++) of the Stellar consensus-based cryptocurrency.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  > Interpersonally he can be prickly sometimes Aren't we all? What's the point in saying this? I find him quite pleasant.
  - kragen 4y ago
    I want people who don't find him quite pleasant to read the slides anyway instead of replying to my comment with "well actually Graydon is the kind of person who..." I'm glad to hear you get along well.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    I think it’s a bit unfair to many people to try to normalize prickliness by saying everyone is.
    - TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
      How much choice do you think prickly people have in who they become? If I'm an asshole, and I recognize that I'm an asshole, but I'm either unable or unwilling to change, would you kill me if I asked it of you or society at large? I certainly don't want to be this way, but find I have little choice in the matter. Any signs of mercy for those of us who are born to suffer?
      - Waterluvian 4y ago
        I’m saying not to dismiss prickliness by declaring that everyone is. Everyone isn’t. Some, many, most? are, sure. “There’s no point singling out people who steal bulk bin candies. Everyone does it.” is the sentiment that sits wrong with me.
        User23 4y ago
        Virtually everyone is prickly when suitably provoked. Some people are just more easily provoked to prickliness than others. Some of it is probably just temperament, but for celebrities in the tech space, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have to deal with an aggravating number of annoying people and that sours their disposition. All that is a long way of saying have some empathy at the very least and some sympathy if possible.
- faitswulff 4y ago
  > Graydon also wrote Monotone, the source control system whose internal design Git is based on. Huh. I wonder if that played a part in Torvald’s being open to Rust in the Linux kernel.
  - kragen 4y ago
    It's an interesting question, but I suspect that the technical attributes of Rust as it exists today play a much larger part in Torvalds's choices than does its origin many years ago. In particular, Rust is less error-prone than C, rather than more so (as is arguably the case for C++), and it does not require the importation of a large runtime into the kernel. And, unlike for example Lua or Scheme, a number of kernels have already been written in Rust, some of which are already fairly full-featured: https://github.com/flosse/rust-os-comparison https://github.com/flosse/rust-os-comparison
    - nextos 4y ago
      Also Rust semantics is more amenable to formal verification. This might have major implications in 5-10 years time.
- atgreen 4y ago
  This is unfair. I worked with Graydon years ago and he was always pleasant, helpful, and interesting. I wish I worked with more people like Graydon. Regardless, you are right to point out two of his contributions that have left an indelible mark on our industry.
  - kragen 4y ago
    I want people who don't wish they worked with more people like Graydon to read the slides anyway instead of replying to my comment with "well actually Graydon is the kind of person who..." I'm glad to hear you got along well.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  > Monotone, the source control system whose internal design Git is based on Huh? They both use content-addressing (identify everything by its hash) which leads to the nice property that history is cryptographically immutable, but at least Mercurial also does (and is also older than Git). But other than that, they're fairly different. The concept of what a branch is is fundamentally different. In Git, it's a pointer to a revision, and has a home (it's mutable scalar that a URI could point to). In Monotone, a branch is "all revisions - whether or not you know about them - that have a certificate that you trust that says they're in that branch". (I describe that as Monotone being distributed as in Usenet, while Git is federated as in Email.) Monotone treats a file as an object (so it can be explicitly renamed or deleted), where Git only has "this tree has a file at this location" and then can infer renames or deletes or creates (or copies or splits or whatever). Plus of course there's the whole "monotone uses SQLite" thing.
muggermuch 4y ago
This is excellent, thanks for sharing!
- eternalban 4y ago
  You're welcome. Also wanted to give HN heads up that LtU is back up.
amelius 4y ago
Does it cover JIT compilation? Or modern concurrently garbage collecting runtimes? What are good resources?
- sanxiyn 4y ago
  It covers JIT, but not runtime. There is The Garbage Collection Handbook, but yeah, I would love to read similar slides for GC.
tester756 4y ago
>Use compiler-friendly languages, by which he is really taking about languages that are good for implementing compilers, like Lisp and ML why?
- rwmj 4y ago
  You can easily match over structures, reaching into ASTs to any depth, which makes writing certain optimizations easier. As a very contrived example: match expr with | Mul (Const x, Const y) -> Const (x*y) | Mul (x, Const 2) -> (* optimize as a left shift *) | ...
  - bicarbonato 4y ago
    It might not be a great language to create compilers, but python also has a pretty good structured pattern matching as of version 3.10: class BinOp: def __init__(self, left, right, operator): self.left = left self.right = right self.operator = operator sum_of_ints = BinOp(left=1, right=1, operator='+') match sum_of_ints: case BinOp(left=int(left), right=int(right), operator='+'): print(f'Summing int {left} + {right}') case BinOp(left=str(left), right=str(right), operator='+'): print(f'Concateneting strings {left} + {right}') case _: print('Don\'t know how to sum this')
    - sealeck 4y ago
      One shortcoming (though it's nice that Python has this) of this is that this isn't checked for exhaustiveness by the compiler (because there isn't a Python one) which makes it easy to forget cases and introduce bugs. Not sure if there are any runtime checks for this?
    - danuker 4y ago
      And look at the difference in verbosity. Lisp is to Python as Python is to Java.
- Fellshard 4y ago
  I expect the former because sexprs give you AST structure for free, and the latter because pattern-matched dispatch on AST nodes is ubiquitous.
alexisread 4y ago
It's a shame the maru compiler didn't get a mention: Self-hosted (x86) in 1800LOC, bootstrapped from C-maru compiled with gcc or clang, 70% the speed of C with gcc. Current maintainer is Attila Lendvai https://github.com/attila-lendvai/maru/tree/piumarta https://github.com/attila-lendvai/maru/tree/piumarta
- agent281 4y ago
  I often look at C codebases and think "what an unreadable mess!" Most of that is probably because of my own shortcomings, but occasionally I see a codebase like this and realize it doesn't have to be that bad!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
titzer 4y ago
The slide on V8 seems to give the impression that V8 just changed "IRs", but in reality, all of the compilers over the years are so different from each other that they really are totally different systems. V8 has been a microcosm of execution strategies and has completely revamped itself multiple times.
levodelellis 4y ago
The slides seems like a history talk or a pep talk. I didn't really get anything from it and I wrote a non trivial compiler so I would understand the details. This seems like it'd be a fun talk to listen to. A quick search doesn't show any audios/videos online
- eternalban 4y ago
  "On March 26, Graydon Hoare, the original creator of the Rust programming language, stopped in to speak about compilers to some lucky University of British Columbia students in the school’s introductory class to compiler construction. "With the aspiring compiler designers of tomorrow in mind, Hoare’s talk spanned the history of building compilers for programming languages (He didn’t record the talk, so we have the slides to go by). He told the students he wanted to demystify that space “between class projects and industrial compilers” to “reduce terror, spark curiosity, encourage trying it as a career.” https://thenewstack.io/rust-creator-graydon-hoare-recounts-the-history-of-compilers/ https://thenewstack.io/rust-creator-graydon-hoare-recounts-t...
lioeters 4y ago
That's the third Hoare for me today. 1. Tony Hoare - "I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years." Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake - https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billion-Dollar-Mistake-Tony-Hoare/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Bill... 2. C.A.R. Hoare - "The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user." 3. Graydon Hoare - "Rust started as a personal project (on my own laptop, on my own time) in 2006. It was a small but real 17kloc native compiler for linux, mac and windows by the time Mozilla began sponsoring it in 2009-10." EDIT: C.A.R. = Charles Antony Richard = Tony. Not to be confused with his twin brother C.D.R.
- xdavidliu 4y ago
  > C.A.R. = Charles Antony Richard = Tony. Not to be confused with his twin brother C.D.R. I thought you were making a Lisp joke, and I Google for Cdr Hoare.
- oaw-bct-ar-bamf 4y ago
  2. C.A.R. Hoare - "The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user." This is something I am guilty of too often. I get lost in fixing the minute details and edge cases that might come reality under very special circumstances only. It is good to step back once in a while and focus on whether the thing you are working on actually has an effect on the user experience or user interaction with your product. Don’t lose the big picture out of sight for all the small edge cases
ofrzeta 4y ago
Slide #21 mentions "your textbook has 3 implementation flavours. Java, C, ML. That's probably https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/ https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/ then.

205 points by eternalban 4y ago

Some items of interest mentioned in the talk: SRI-ARC: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/finding-aids/102706170-SRI/102706170-SRI.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/fi... Frances Allen (RIP): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24066832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24066832

kragen 4y ago

For those who aren't aware, in addition to inventing Rust, Graydon also wrote Monotone, the source control system whose internal design Git is based on. Interpersonally he can be prickly sometimes but his opinions are well worth listening to.

agumonkey 4y ago
Oh I had no clue he was behind monotone nor git's lifting it. Have you both collaborated on something ?
- zoltar 4y ago
  Linus was hanging out in the monotone list for a bit and was a little frustrated with the performance at the time. https://lwn.net/Articles/132161/ https://lwn.net/Articles/132161/
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    interesting bit of history also reread about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_(software) it's funny how like a few other projects, the original high level interface (cogito) got canned and the low level one ended up the main. I've read this about apt (which was a sub project of a big debian graphical package management) and lisp too.
everybodyknows 4y ago
Also the core code (in C++) of the Stellar consensus-based cryptocurrency.
ModernMech 4y ago
> Interpersonally he can be prickly sometimes Aren't we all? What's the point in saying this? I find him quite pleasant.
- kragen 4y ago
  I want people who don't find him quite pleasant to read the slides anyway instead of replying to my comment with "well actually Graydon is the kind of person who..." I'm glad to hear you get along well.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  I think it’s a bit unfair to many people to try to normalize prickliness by saying everyone is.
  - TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
    How much choice do you think prickly people have in who they become? If I'm an asshole, and I recognize that I'm an asshole, but I'm either unable or unwilling to change, would you kill me if I asked it of you or society at large? I certainly don't want to be this way, but find I have little choice in the matter. Any signs of mercy for those of us who are born to suffer?
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      I’m saying not to dismiss prickliness by declaring that everyone is. Everyone isn’t. Some, many, most? are, sure. “There’s no point singling out people who steal bulk bin candies. Everyone does it.” is the sentiment that sits wrong with me.
      - User23 4y ago
        Virtually everyone is prickly when suitably provoked. Some people are just more easily provoked to prickliness than others. Some of it is probably just temperament, but for celebrities in the tech space, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have to deal with an aggravating number of annoying people and that sours their disposition. All that is a long way of saying have some empathy at the very least and some sympathy if possible.
faitswulff 4y ago
> Graydon also wrote Monotone, the source control system whose internal design Git is based on. Huh. I wonder if that played a part in Torvald’s being open to Rust in the Linux kernel.
- kragen 4y ago
  It's an interesting question, but I suspect that the technical attributes of Rust as it exists today play a much larger part in Torvalds's choices than does its origin many years ago. In particular, Rust is less error-prone than C, rather than more so (as is arguably the case for C++), and it does not require the importation of a large runtime into the kernel. And, unlike for example Lua or Scheme, a number of kernels have already been written in Rust, some of which are already fairly full-featured: https://github.com/flosse/rust-os-comparison https://github.com/flosse/rust-os-comparison
  - nextos 4y ago
    Also Rust semantics is more amenable to formal verification. This might have major implications in 5-10 years time.
atgreen 4y ago
This is unfair. I worked with Graydon years ago and he was always pleasant, helpful, and interesting. I wish I worked with more people like Graydon. Regardless, you are right to point out two of his contributions that have left an indelible mark on our industry.
- kragen 4y ago
  I want people who don't wish they worked with more people like Graydon to read the slides anyway instead of replying to my comment with "well actually Graydon is the kind of person who..." I'm glad to hear you got along well.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
tbrownaw 4y ago
> Monotone, the source control system whose internal design Git is based on Huh? They both use content-addressing (identify everything by its hash) which leads to the nice property that history is cryptographically immutable, but at least Mercurial also does (and is also older than Git). But other than that, they're fairly different. The concept of what a branch is is fundamentally different. In Git, it's a pointer to a revision, and has a home (it's mutable scalar that a URI could point to). In Monotone, a branch is "all revisions - whether or not you know about them - that have a certificate that you trust that says they're in that branch". (I describe that as Monotone being distributed as in Usenet, while Git is federated as in Email.) Monotone treats a file as an object (so it can be explicitly renamed or deleted), where Git only has "this tree has a file at this location" and then can infer renames or deletes or creates (or copies or splits or whatever). Plus of course there's the whole "monotone uses SQLite" thing.

muggermuch 4y ago

This is excellent, thanks for sharing!

eternalban 4y ago
You're welcome. Also wanted to give HN heads up that LtU is back up.

amelius 4y ago

Does it cover JIT compilation? Or modern concurrently garbage collecting runtimes? What are good resources?

sanxiyn 4y ago
It covers JIT, but not runtime. There is The Garbage Collection Handbook, but yeah, I would love to read similar slides for GC.

tester756 4y ago

>Use compiler-friendly languages, by which he is really taking about languages that are good for implementing compilers, like Lisp and ML why?

rwmj 4y ago
You can easily match over structures, reaching into ASTs to any depth, which makes writing certain optimizations easier. As a very contrived example: match expr with | Mul (Const x, Const y) -> Const (x*y) | Mul (x, Const 2) -> (* optimize as a left shift *) | ...
- bicarbonato 4y ago
  It might not be a great language to create compilers, but python also has a pretty good structured pattern matching as of version 3.10: class BinOp: def __init__(self, left, right, operator): self.left = left self.right = right self.operator = operator sum_of_ints = BinOp(left=1, right=1, operator='+') match sum_of_ints: case BinOp(left=int(left), right=int(right), operator='+'): print(f'Summing int {left} + {right}') case BinOp(left=str(left), right=str(right), operator='+'): print(f'Concateneting strings {left} + {right}') case _: print('Don\'t know how to sum this')
  - sealeck 4y ago
    One shortcoming (though it's nice that Python has this) of this is that this isn't checked for exhaustiveness by the compiler (because there isn't a Python one) which makes it easy to forget cases and introduce bugs. Not sure if there are any runtime checks for this?
  - danuker 4y ago
    And look at the difference in verbosity. Lisp is to Python as Python is to Java.
Fellshard 4y ago
I expect the former because sexprs give you AST structure for free, and the latter because pattern-matched dispatch on AST nodes is ubiquitous.

alexisread 4y ago

It's a shame the maru compiler didn't get a mention: Self-hosted (x86) in 1800LOC, bootstrapped from C-maru compiled with gcc or clang, 70% the speed of C with gcc. Current maintainer is Attila Lendvai https://github.com/attila-lendvai/maru/tree/piumarta https://github.com/attila-lendvai/maru/tree/piumarta

agent281 4y ago
I often look at C codebases and think "what an unreadable mess!" Most of that is probably because of my own shortcomings, but occasionally I see a codebase like this and realize it doesn't have to be that bad!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

titzer 4y ago

The slide on V8 seems to give the impression that V8 just changed "IRs", but in reality, all of the compilers over the years are so different from each other that they really are totally different systems. V8 has been a microcosm of execution strategies and has completely revamped itself multiple times.

levodelellis 4y ago

The slides seems like a history talk or a pep talk. I didn't really get anything from it and I wrote a non trivial compiler so I would understand the details. This seems like it'd be a fun talk to listen to. A quick search doesn't show any audios/videos online

eternalban 4y ago
"On March 26, Graydon Hoare, the original creator of the Rust programming language, stopped in to speak about compilers to some lucky University of British Columbia students in the school’s introductory class to compiler construction. "With the aspiring compiler designers of tomorrow in mind, Hoare’s talk spanned the history of building compilers for programming languages (He didn’t record the talk, so we have the slides to go by). He told the students he wanted to demystify that space “between class projects and industrial compilers” to “reduce terror, spark curiosity, encourage trying it as a career.” https://thenewstack.io/rust-creator-graydon-hoare-recounts-the-history-of-compilers/ https://thenewstack.io/rust-creator-graydon-hoare-recounts-t...

lioeters 4y ago

That's the third Hoare for me today. 1. Tony Hoare - "I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years." Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake - https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billion-Dollar-Mistake-Tony-Hoare/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Bill... 2. C.A.R. Hoare - "The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user." 3. Graydon Hoare - "Rust started as a personal project (on my own laptop, on my own time) in 2006. It was a small but real 17kloc native compiler for linux, mac and windows by the time Mozilla began sponsoring it in 2009-10." EDIT: C.A.R. = Charles Antony Richard = Tony. Not to be confused with his twin brother C.D.R.

xdavidliu 4y ago
> C.A.R. = Charles Antony Richard = Tony. Not to be confused with his twin brother C.D.R. I thought you were making a Lisp joke, and I Google for Cdr Hoare.
oaw-bct-ar-bamf 4y ago
2. C.A.R. Hoare - "The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user." This is something I am guilty of too often. I get lost in fixing the minute details and edge cases that might come reality under very special circumstances only. It is good to step back once in a while and focus on whether the thing you are working on actually has an effect on the user experience or user interaction with your product. Don’t lose the big picture out of sight for all the small edge cases

ofrzeta 4y ago

Slide #21 mentions "your textbook has 3 implementation flavours. Java, C, ML. That's probably https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/ https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/ then.