Readit NewsPhilpax commented on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/modeless
Frankly, I think you are exaggerating. My university had a course that required students to build a C compiler that could run the C subset of SPECint (which includes frigging Perl) and this was the usual 3 month class that was not expected to fill in 24h of your time, so I'd say 1 week sounds perfectly reasonable for someone already familiar. Good enough C for a shitton of projects is barely more complicated than writing an assembler, in fact, that is one of C's strong points (which is also the source of most of its weaknesses).
I really, really don't think so, but you're welcome to try :-)
Philpax commented on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/modeless
I found this one too: https://github.com/PhilippRados/wrecc
A genuinely impressive effort, but alas, still missing some pretty critical features (const, floating point, bools, inline, anonymous structs in function args).
Philpax commented on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/modeless
Philpax commented on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/modeless
This is very much a "vibe coding can build you the Great Pyramids but it can't build a cathedral" situation, as described earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46898223
I know this is an impressive accomplishment and is meant to show us the future potential, but it achieves big results by throwing an insane amount of compute at the problem, brute forcing its way to functionality. $20,000 set on fire, at Claude's discounted Max pricing no less.
Linear results from exponential compute is not nothing, but this certain feels like a dead end approach. The frontier should be more complexity for less compute, not more complexity from an insane amount more compute.
> $20,000 in API costs
I would interpret this as being at API pricing. At subscription pricing, it's probably at most 5 or 6 Max subscriptions worth.
Philpax commented on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/modeless
Next time can you build a Rust compiler in C? It doesn't even have to check things or have a borrow checker, as long as it reduces the compile times so it's like a fast debug iteration compiler.
You will experience very spooky behaviour if you do this, as the language is designed around those semantics. Nonetheless, mrustc exists: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc
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.
Philpax commented on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/modeless
Philpax commented on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/modeless
Yeah, didn't mention gas or ld, for similar reasons. I agree that a compiler doesn't necessarily "need" those.
I don't agree that all the claims are backed up by their own comments, which means that there's probably other places where it falls down.
Its... Misrepresentation.
Like Chicken is a Scheme compiler. But they're very up front that it depends on a C compiler.
Here, they wrote a C compiler that is at least sometimes reliant on having a different C compiler around. So is the project at 50%? 75%?
Even if its 99%, thats not the same story as they tried to write. And if they wrote that tale instead, it would be more impressive, rather than "There's some holes. How many?"
Their C compiler is not reliant on having another C compiler around. Compiling the 16-bit real mode bootstrap for the Linux kernel on x86(-64) requires another C compiler; you certainly don't need another compiler to compile the kernel for another architecture, or to compile another piece of software not subject to the 32k constraint.
The compiler itself is entirely functional; it just can't generate code optimal enough to fit within the constraints for that very specific (tiny!) part of the system, so another compiler is required to do that step.
and why do they need react...
That's actually relatively understandable. The React model (not necessarily React itself) of compositional reactive one-way data binding has become dominant in UI development over the last decade because it's easy to work with and does not require you to keep track of the state of a retained UI.
Most modern UI systems are inspired by React or a variant of its model.