4 ms·

There's no way to say this without sounding mean: Everything Chris Lattner has done has been a "successful mess". He's obviously smart, but a horrible engineer.

• refulgentis 8mo ago
  > Everything Chris Lattner has done has been a "successful mess". I don't have an emotional reaction to this, i.e. I don't think you're being mean, but it is wrong and reductive, which people usually will concisely, and perhaps reductively, describe as "mean". Why is it wrong? LLVM is great. Chris Lattner left Apple a *decade* ago, & thus has ~0 impact or responsibility on Swift interop with C++ today. Swift is a fun language to write, hence, why they shoehorned it in, in the first place. Mojo is fine, but I wouldn't really know how you or I would judge it. For me, I'm not super-opinionated on Python, and it doesn't diverge heavily from it afaik.
  • carefree-bob 8mo ago
    Not just LLVM, but Google's TPU seems to be doing fine also. Honestly it's an impressive track record.
    • refulgentis 8mo ago
      He had 0 to do with the TPU. I was hired around Google around the same time, but not nearly as famous :) AFAICouldT it was a "hire first, figure out what to do later", and it ended up being Swift for TensorFlow. That went ~nowhere, and he left within 2 years. That's fine and doesn't reflect on him, in general, that's Google for ya. At least that era of Google.
      • carefree-bob 8mo ago
        Ahh, thanks for the info. Yeah, I heard Google was a bit messy from colleagues who went there.
• dismalaf 8mo ago
  That's why there's nothing that comes close to LLVM and MLIR, right? If he's such a horrible engineer then we should have lots of LLVM replacements, right?
  • pbohun 8mo ago
    QBE is a tiny project, but I think illustrates a better intermediate language design. https://c9x.me/compile/ https://c9x.me/compile/
    • dismalaf 8mo ago
      Except performance isn't great and it covers far fewer platforms. It aims for 70% performance but the few benchmarks I've seen show more like 30-50% performance. It's a cool project and I'd consider it for a toy language but it's far from an LLVM replacement.
  • levodelellis 8mo ago
    Many compilers including my own uses C89
    • dismalaf 8mo ago
      You'll still need a C compiler...
      • levodelellis 8mo ago
        I never heard of hardware without one
        • dismalaf 8mo ago
          Avoiding interacting with LLVM as a user doesn't mean you've created something equivalent to LLVM. And if the C compiler you use is clang then you're still literally making use of LLVM.
• bahmboo 8mo ago
  You don't explain or support your position, you are calling Lattner names. That's not helpful to me or anyone else if we are trying to evaluate his work. Swift has millions of users as does Mojo and Modular in general. These are not trivial accomplishments.
  • satvikpendem 8mo ago
    Mojo and Modular have millions of users?
    • bahmboo 8mo ago
      You can answer that question yourself.
      • satvikpendem 8mo ago
        You're right, looks like they don't, in fact, have millions of users.
        • bahmboo 8mo ago
          Sick burn my man. Hope you check out Mojo lang vs arguing about rounding errors. I’m still unclear why I’m supposed to steer clear of Lattner which was what we were discussing.
          • satvikpendem 8mo ago
            Not sure what you're even talking about. You said something I was curious about since I thought you knew something about it I didn't but then you told me to look it up myself, for some reason, and I did. I don't know how you construed that as a "sick burn" or that you're "supposed to steer clear of Lattner," both of which I never said or implied.
            • bahmboo 8mo ago
• pbohun 8mo ago
  People are correct I didn't explain my position. LLVM: Pretty much everyone who has created a programming language with it has complained about its design. gingerbill, Jon Blow, and Andrew Kelley have all complained about it. LLVM is a good idea, but it that idea was executed better by Ken Thompson with his C compiler for Plan 9, and then again with his Go compiler design. Ken decided to create his own "architecture agnostic" assembly, which is very similar to the IR idea with LLVM. Swift: I was very excited with the first release of Swift. But it ultimately did not have a very focused vision outlined for it. Because of this, it has morphed into a mess. It tries to be everything for everyone, like C++, and winds up being mediocre, and slow to compile to top it off. Mojo isn't doesn't exist for the public yet. I hope it turns out to be awesome, but I'm just not going to get my hopes up this time.
  • jervant 8mo ago
    How many languages are using LLVM as its backend vs Go's?
    • hu3 8mo ago
      Go never advertised, designed for, nor supported external usage of their backend.
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    • pbohun 8mo ago
      As far as I know, only Go uses Go's back end because it was specifically designed for Go. But the architecture is such that it makes it trivial for Go to cross compile for any OS and architecture. This is something that LLVM cannot do. You have to compile a new compiler for every OS and arch combo you wish to compile to. You could imagine creating a modified Go assembler that is more generic and not tied to Go's ABI that could accomplish the same effect as LLVM. However, it'd probably be better to create a project like that from scratch, because most of Go's optimizations happen before reaching the assembler stage. It would probably be best to have the intermediate language that QBE has and transform that into "intermediate assembly" (IA) very similar to Go's assembly. That way the IL stage could contain nearly all the optimization passes, and the IA stage would focus on code generation that would translate to any OS/arch combo.