This is just a frontend. It uses Cranelift as the backend. It's missing some fairly basic language features like bitfields and variadic functions. And if I'm reading the documentation right, it requires all the source code to be in a single file...
Look at what those compilers are capable of compiling and to which targets, and compare it to what this compiler can do. Those are wonderful, and I have nothing but respect for them, but they aren't going to be compiling the Linux kernel.
Ok you can say this about literally any compiler though. The authors of every compiler have intimate knowledge of other compilers, how is this different?
Being written in rust is meaningless IMHO. There is absolutely zero inherent value to something being written in rust. Sometimes it's the right tool for the job, sometimes it isn't.
It means that it's not directly copying existing C compiler code which is overwhelmingly not written in Rust. Even if your argument is that it is plagiarizing C code and doing a direct translation to Rust, that's a pretty interesting capability for it to have.
Translating things between languages is probably one of the least interesting capabilities of LLMs - it's the one thing that they're pretty much meant to do well by design.
Surely you agree that directly copying existing code into a different language is still plagiarism?
I completely agree that "reweite this existing codebase into a new language" could be a very powerful tool. But the article is making much bolder claims. And the result was more limited in capability, so you can't even really claim they've achieved the rewrite skill yet.
There are many, here's a simple Google search:
https://github.com/jyn514/saltwater
https://github.com/ClementTsang/rustcc
https://github.com/maekawatoshiki/rucc
Did you actually look at these?
> https://github.com/jyn514/saltwater
This is just a frontend. It uses Cranelift as the backend. It's missing some fairly basic language features like bitfields and variadic functions. And if I'm reading the documentation right, it requires all the source code to be in a single file...
> https://github.com/ClementTsang/rustcc
This will compile basically no real-world code. The only supported data type is "int".
> https://github.com/maekawatoshiki/rucc
This is just a frontend. It uses LLVM as the backend.
Look at what those compilers are capable of compiling and to which targets, and compare it to what this compiler can do. Those are wonderful, and I have nothing but respect for them, but they aren't going to be compiling the Linux kernel.
I just did a quick Google search only on GitHub, maybe there are better ones out there on the internet?
I found this one too: https://github.com/PhilippRados/wrecc
Language doesn't really matter, it's not how things are mapped in the latent space. It only needs to know how to do it in one language.
Ok you can say this about literally any compiler though. The authors of every compiler have intimate knowledge of other compilers, how is this different?
Being written in rust is meaningless IMHO. There is absolutely zero inherent value to something being written in rust. Sometimes it's the right tool for the job, sometimes it isn't.
It means that it's not directly copying existing C compiler code which is overwhelmingly not written in Rust. Even if your argument is that it is plagiarizing C code and doing a direct translation to Rust, that's a pretty interesting capability for it to have.
Translating things between languages is probably one of the least interesting capabilities of LLMs - it's the one thing that they're pretty much meant to do well by design.
Surely you agree that directly copying existing code into a different language is still plagiarism?
I completely agree that "reweite this existing codebase into a new language" could be a very powerful tool. But the article is making much bolder claims. And the result was more limited in capability, so you can't even really claim they've achieved the rewrite skill yet.
Please don't open a bridge to the Rust flamewar from the AI flamewar :-)
Hahaha, fair enough, but I refuse to be shy about having this opinion :)