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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

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petcat·

> The process of compiling higher order language to assembly is deterministic and well-tested.

Here are the reported miscompilation bugs in GCC so far in 2026. The ones labeled "wrong-code".

https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?chfield=%5BBug%20cr...

I count 121 of them.

I've posted this 3 times now. Code-generation by compilers written by experts is not deterministic in the way that you think it is.

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If the "bug" shows up every time in the output given the same input, then it definitely is deterministic.

Just because there are bugs does not mean a compiler is non-deterministic. I looked through a bunch of the bug reports and there is nothing there that can't be fixed to make it deterministic.

You can't fix an LLM to be absolutely deterministic, but you can fix a compiler.

In the 12+ years I've been a professional developer, I can only remember two bugs that were caused by the compiler / interpreter, everything else were logic bugs, oversights, 3rd-party libraries, misunderstanding of the requirements, internal contradictions in the requirements etc.

So that's maybe 0.1% of all the bugs I've touched.

In that sense, code generation isn't really an interesting source of bugs for the discussion at hand.

There were more ~26+ years ago. gcc and egcs had some subtle register allocator bugs that would get tripped up under heavy register pressure on i386 that were the bane of my existence as a kernel developer at the time.

It's close enough. If we had a build pipeline that kept prompts in source control, and ran it through an LLM and then a compiler to produce the build output, this would fall over constantly. You'd get radically different results every time. Build pipelines that store actual source code in source control, then run them through a compiler to produce the build output, are used all over the place and they generally work great.

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