Comment by js8

25 days ago

> You proof for your argument that a compiler is undeterministic is to change the whole compiler to another version and saying it won’t produce the same output as the old one.

Fair enough. What I meant though was that compilation as a process is not deterministic, because often when you recompile couple years later, you're using a different compiler. (In modern world it can be much shorter time, actually.)

> And we have software like Unix, enacs, ksh, awk… that’s all written in C.

So? IIRC, first compiler was FORTRAN, invented in 1958. OpenAI Codex, first coding LLM, came out August 2021. So we are like in a year 1963. For this comparison, we have ten more years to produce (using a coding LLM) a compiler and operating system just from the textual specification, without an intermediate formal programming language. Funny - we have actually already done that (Claude C Compiler, VibexOS).

> So? IIRC, first compiler was FORTRAN, invented in 1958. OpenAI Codex, first coding LLM, came out August 2021. So we are like in a year 1963. For this comparison, we have ten more years to produce (using a coding LLM) a compiler and operating system just from the textual specification, without an intermediate formal programming language.

Nope, the timeframe would have been three years

  In 1961, the MCP was the first OS written exclusively in a high-level language (HLL).[0]

So by 2024, we should all have been able to verify that LLMs are reliable to produce a good enough product. Instead, it’s just slop everywhere, where the one producing it does not even care about its creation.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP#History