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Comment by 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.

32 comments

qarl

Reply
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.

  • 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.

    • f1shy  18 days ago

      Making a basic C compiler, without much error/warn detection and/or optimizations, is as a matter if fact no so difficult. In many Universities is a semester project for 2 to 3 students.

  • rezonant  20 days ago

    > Building a working C compiler ... is an impossible task

    I think you might be thinking of C++

    • icedchai  20 days ago

      I’m not. I’ve been working with C on and off for 30 years. Linux requires GNU extensions beyond standard C. Once you get the basics done, there’s still a lot more work to do. Compiling a trivial program might work. But you’ll hit an edge case or 50 in the millions of lines in Linux.

      I also should’ve qualified my message with “in 2 weeks”, or even “in 2 months.” Given more time it’s obviously possible for more people.

  • rhubarbtree  21 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.

    • menaerus  20 days ago

      You are underestimating the complexity of the task so do other people on the thread. It's not trivial to implement a working C compiler very much so to implement the one that proves its worth by successfully compiling one of the largest open-source code repositories ever, which btw is not even a plain ISO C dialect.

      10 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.