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I want to believe this is sarcasm, but it's so hard to tell these days.
by kibwen 2mo ago
I want to believe this is sarcasm, but it's so hard to tell these days.
- petcat 2mo agoIt's not sarcasm. We've all accepted that code-generation has been required and accepted for decades.
- __d 2mo agoCode generation (by compiler) has one major difference: it's deterministic.
- petcat 2mo agoHere are the reported miscompilation bugs in GCC so far in 2026. The ones labeled "wrong-code". https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?chfield=%5BBug%20cr https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?chfield=%5BBug%20cr I count 500+ of them.
- absoflutely 2mo agoNot sure what your point is here since wrong code doesn't mean non-deterministic. How many of these yield different results with the same input and architecture?
- smallerize 2mo agoThat's not what "deterministic" means.
- nonethewiser 2mo agoFor many cases like the one described, its true.
- kibwen 2mo agoIt's not. The majority of people regularly using GCC to develop C code (IOW, the primary use case of GCC) are familiar with assembly.
- fragmede 2mo agoHow familiar? Do they ever look at the .S files? know what ar and nm do? Deal with objdump? How important are those details for day-to-day compiling of C code for regular programmers?
- kibwen 2mo agoYes, they know what ar and nm do. Whether these things are relevant for day-to-day compiling of C code is watching the goalposts sail over the horizon; the original statement being mocked here is "we don't need to learn ASM because GCC is so good", which completely betrays ignorance of why people learn still learn and deal with ASM to this day. Even if LLMs were comparable to compilers either in predictability (they're not) or code quality (they're not), the people who know what they're doing still take pains to understand how their tech stacks work, because that makes them better programmers, and this will continue to be true.