Comment by manquer

2 days ago

Just because we don't understand or know about compilers or able to read their output does not make them fungible.

In old days we chose between Turbo/Borland C, Quick C and GCC. We didn't think them same or trust blindly even if we didn't know how they worked.

The best developers hand optimized assembly for sub routines which they knew compilers were not good at, the rest of us sure didn't understand how any of it worked, but nonetheless felt the differences and chose with dollars and usage .

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manquer

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crowcroft  1 day ago

Part of what I’m getting at is exactly your point that we used to think about what compiler to use and didn’t always blindly trust them.

If you have enough tests at what point does AI rewriting software in a different language become close enough to ‘deterministic’? Maybe never, maybe not.