Comment by p-e-w
21 days ago
> I can write you an unoptimised C compiler that emits assembly for $20k
You may be willing to sell your work at that price, but that’s not the market rate, to put it very mildly. Even 10 times that would be seriously lowballing in the realm of contract work, regardless of whether it’s “optimised” or not (most software isn’t).
> You may be willing to sell your work at that price, but that’s not the market rate, to put it very mildly.
It is now.
At any rate, this is my actual rate. I live in South Africa, and that's about 4 weeks of work for me, without an AI.
Deal. I'll pay you IF you can achieve the same level of performance. Heck, I'll double it.
You must provide the entire git history with small commits.
I won't be holding my breath.
> Deal. I'll pay you IF you can achieve the same level of performance. Heck, I'll double it.
> You must provide the entire git history with small commits.
> I won't be holding my breath.
Sure; I do this often (I operate as a company because I am a contractor) - money to be held in escrow, all the usual contracts, etc.
It's a big risk for you, though - the level of performance isn't stated in the linked article so a parser in Python is probably sufficient.
TCC, which has in the past compiled bootable Linux images, was only around 15k LoC in C!
For reference, for a engraved-in-stone spec, producing a command-line program (i.e. no tech stack other than a programming language with the standard library), a coder could reasonably produce +5000LoC per week.
Adding the necessary extensions to support booting isn't much either, because the 16-bit stuff can be done just the same as CC did it - shell out to GCC (thereby not needing many of the extensions).
Are you *really* sure that a simple C compiler will cost more than 4 weeks f/time to do? It takes 4 weeks or so in C, are you really sure it will take longer if I switch to (for example) Python?
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You seem to have doubled down on a bluff that was already called.
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That’s a VERY nice rate for SA; approximately what I charge in the UK. I assume these are not local companies who hire you.
> That’s a VERY nice rate for SA; approximately what I charge in the UK. I assume these are not local companies who hire you.
A local Fintech needing PCI work pays that, but that's not long-term contracts.
No, you're overestimating how complex it is to write an unoptimized C compiler. C is (in the grand scheme of things) a very simple language to implement a compiler for.
The rate probably goes up if you ask for more and more standards (C11, C17, C23...) but it's still a lot easier than compilers for almost any other popular language.
This is very much a John Brown claim that will in the end, kill the OP. I'd rather have the OP using LLM powered code review tools to add their experience to that AI generated compiler.
That feels like Silicon-Valley-centric point of view. Plus who would really spend $20k in building any C compiler today in the actual landscape of software?
All that this is saying is that license laundering of a code-base is now $20k away through automated processes, at least if the original code base is fully available. Well, with current state-of-the-art you’ll actually end up with a code-base which is not as good as the original, but that’s it.