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The problem you pointed out is real, but determinism in compilers is still useful! Suppose you had one of those widely unstable compilers: concretely if you ch
by eru 9mo ago
The problem you pointed out is real, but determinism in compilers is still useful!
Suppose you had one of those widely unstable compilers: concretely if you change formatting slightly, you get a totally different binary. It still does the same thing as per the language spec, but it goes about it in a completely different way.
This weak determinism is still useful, because you can still get reproducible builds. Eg volunteers can still audit eg debian binary packages by just re-running the compiler with the exact same input to check that the output matches. So they can verify that no supply chain attack has fiddled with the binaries: at least the binaries belong to the sources the are claimed to.
- wat10000 9mo agoIt’s useful but far less important. This is easily seen by the fact that we went decades building lots of software without reproducible builds.
- eru 9mo agoIf you go further back in history, we went even longer without building any software! No clue whether that's a good argument.
- wat10000 9mo agoWhat. The argument is that determinism in compilers isn't particularly important for building software because we did without it for a long time. Your argument would be... that building software isn't particularly important for building software...? The actual argument you'd be making would be something like, building software isn't particularly important for survival. Which is pretty obviously true, for the reason you state.