Comment by karmakaze
21 days ago
I'm not particularly impressed that it can turn C into an SSA IR or assembly etc. The optimizations, however sophisticated is where anything impressive would be. Then again, we have lots of examples in the training set I would expect. C compilers are probably the most popular of all compilers. What would be more impressive is for it to have made a compiler for a well defined language that isn't very close to a popular language.
What I am impressed by is that the task it completed had many steps and the agent didn't get lost or caught in a loop in the many sessions and time it spent doing it.
> What would be more impressive is for it to have made a compiler for a well defined language that isn't very close to a popular language.
That doesn't seem difficult as long as you can translate it into a well-known IR. The Dragon Book for some reason spends all its time talking about frontend parsing, which does give you the impression it's impossible.
I agree writing compilers isn't especially difficult, but it is a lot of work and people are scared of it.
The hard part is UI - error handling and things like that.