Comment by vishvananda
10 hours ago
I’ve been coming around to the same conclusion. We are really just scratching the surface of what we can do with these new tool1. The windmill I have been tilting at is creating a c++ compiler[1] and the most recent version is able to compile about 7x faster than gcc[2]. I don’t know that this is super-useful because people aren’t writing much in c++ these days, but as the article mentions, faster rust compilation would accelerate agentic coding considerably. I’ve just started tackling rust and I don’t have a confirmed result yet but early testing makes me think I can find a 4x+ speed up here.
[1]: https://github.com/vishvananda/cppgm-extended
[2]: caveats here include only c++11, only x86, and potential for bugs, but 7x is pretty darn significant even with caveats
is it faster because it doesn't have much optimization? Most of the slowness of C++ compilers is an extensive search for optimisation opportunities.
For reference I blogged about the previous version here which was ahead of gcc in compile time and produced 50% slower compiled code here: https://medium.com/@vishvananda/agentic-c-compiler-redux-5d1... I haven’t updated with the most recent results but the current v5 reference has the perf stated above
It compiles about 7x faster both at -O0 and -O3. My optimization is not quite on par but it is really close. Compiled code is about 5% slower.