The talk was given to a packed room at ETAPS, a European computer science conference leaning more on the theoretical side (I suppose everyone was curious how op

The talk was given to a packed room at ETAPS, a European computer science conference leaning more on the theoretical side (I suppose everyone was curious how optimizing compilers were dying). All in all, the audience did not bust out the pitchforks, although one might say that "domain-specific compilers" is basically the direction academia has already been heading. I doubt any of the people in the audience who were working on compilers/JITs are planning to stop working on them, though it did make for some fun dinner discussion. There was one mid-talk exchange was one professor asking djb upfront whether or not he thought, in ten years, Mike Pall (author of LuaJIT) would be out of a job--after all, JITs are basically optimizing compilers. Well, the original question was more diplomatic than that, but eventually he pushed it enough that he got djb to not deny that this would be the case. The talk was somewhat marred by a very large digression into an undergrad level primer of computer architecture (it probably would have been better served by an extended Q&A session), although the sorting example he finally built up to was pretty cute.