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Comment by sarchertech | Hacker News Reader

Have they released this publicly? This seems about on the same order of difficulty to anthropic’s C compiler project, which ultimately failed. I’m surprised if they can do SQLite they wouldn’t show up Anthropic with a real working C compiler.

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Maybe C compilers are actually harder?

SQLite at its core is a compiler, and a higher level one than C, so I don’t think that’s likely.

It's compiling a much more tractable language, and most of the complexity in a production C compiler is in the optimizations. C being a lower-level language might make it easier to write a bad compiler for, but it makes it harder to write a good compiler. Take a look at a SQLite query plan sometime and compare it to the assembly output of gcc -O.

They don’t have to produce an optimizing compiler to claim a win though.

gcc -O0 can't compile a bootable Linux kernel, which was their goal

[blatant plug]

I'd point you here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151160 for a real C compiler that autovectorises onto the GPU. Or multiple GPUs, or a network of multiple GPUs.

Of course, this wasn't just "hey Claude, write me a compiler, make it rad, yo" - it's been a 6-month long slog, albeit miniscule in comparison to doing it without the LLM.

This is incredibly impressive. Worth mentioning that it's FOSS, under the GPL, since that's a blessing that can't be taken for granted these days.

Hey, thanks :)

It’s nice to get some appreciation for once, rather than an “ai; dr” response :)

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