Posted by modeless 10 hours ago
If you don't care about code quality, maintainability, readability, conformance to the specification, and performance of the compiler and of the compiled code, please, give me your $20,000, I'll give you your C compiler written from scratch :)
i don't know if you could. Let's say you get a check for $20k, how long will it take you to make an equivalent performing and compliant compiler? Are you going to put your life on pause until it's done for $20k? Who's going to pay your bills when the $20k is gone after 3 months?
A whole lot of UB in the actual SIMD impls (who'd have expected), but that can actually be fine here if the compiler is made to not take advantage of the UB. And then there's the super-weird mix of manual loops vs inline assembly vs builtins.
Imho some commenters focus way too much on the (many, and honestly also shared by the blog post too) cons, that they forget to be genuinely impressed by the steps forward.
It will not be noticeably faster because most of the time isn't spent in the checks, it's spent in the codegen. The cranelift backend for rustc might help with this.
1) obvious green field project 2) well defined spec which will definitely be in the training data 3) an end result which lands you 90% from the finish
Now comes the hard part, the last 10%. Still not impressed here. Since fixing issues in the end was impossible without introducing bugs I have doubts about quality
I'm glad they do call it out in the end. That's fair
What I am impressed by is that the task it completed had many steps and the agent didn't get lost or caught in a loop in the many sessions and time it spent doing it.