Comment by bopbopbop7

21 days ago

100k lines of clean, bug free, optimized, and vulnerability free code or 100k lines of outsourced slop? Two very different price points.

33 comments

bopbopbop7

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qarl  21 days ago

A compiler that can build linux.

That level of quality should be sufficient.

Do you know any low quality programmers that write C compilers in rust THAT CAN BUILD LINUX?

No you don't. They do not exist.

  • icedchai  21 days ago

    Yep. Building a working C compiler that compiles Linux is an impossible task for all but the top 1% of developers. And the ones that could do it have better things to do, plus they’d want a lot more than 20K for the trouble.

    • vbezhenar  21 days ago

      What's so hard about it? Compiler construction is well researched topic and taught in the universities. I made toy language compiler as a student. May be I'm underestimating this task, but I think that I can build some simple C compiler which will output trivial assembly. Given my salary of $2500, that would probably take me around a year, so that's pretty close LoL.

      4 replies →

    • viraptor  20 days ago

      It's a bit more nuanced. You can build a simple compiler without too many issues. But once you want it to do optimisations, flow control protection, good and fast register allocation, inling, autovectoriasation, etc. that's going to take a multiples of the original time.

    • dgacmu  20 days ago

      Some of the hardest parts of the compiler are optimization and clear error handling/reporting. If you forego those - because you're testing against a codebase that is already free of things that break compilation and have no particular performance requirements for the generated code - it's a substantially simpler task.

      1 reply →

    • rhubarbtree  20 days ago

      Interesting, why impossible? We studied compiler construction at uni. I might have to dig out a few books, but I’m confident I could write one. I can’t imagine anyone on my course of 120 nerds being unable to do this.

      11 replies →

  • bopbopbop7  21 days ago

    Do you think this was guided by a low quality Anthropic developer?

    You can give a developer the GCC test suite and have them build the compiler backwards, which is how this was done. They literally brute forced it, most developers can brute force. It also literally uses GCC in the background... Maybe try reading the article.