posted in Technology
Torvalds: AI Is the New Compiler, Not the New Programmer
pbxscience.com/torvalds-ai-is-the-new-compiler-not-the-new-programmer/
Never seen a non-deterministic compiler though
C/C++ compilers are non deterministic due to support of super macros that change run to run, non-deterministic optimisation strategies or ordering due to parallelism, and linkers often produce different outputs every time they are run where subtle bugs can cause crashes when addresses don’t line up how you expect. And that’s without mentioning projects that use a configuration step.
It’s actually a big problem in producing reproducible builds for security.
I’m not very good with C/C++ so please correct me, isn’t that what’s called a “race condition”? Parallelism can cause non-determinism but not in the same sense LLMs generate non-deterministic output. Compilers are not statistical machines.
You don’t need parallelism to have a race condition, just not handling an event with expected timing can cause one - like when two keys are pressed within one polling cycle and you depend on one being pressed before the other for some logic like up and right arrow for a diagonal but they register as right and up so the diagonal movement doesn’t trigger
Compiler optimisation strategies sometimes use statistical machines and link time optimisation does use random number generators for producing output
From my understanding, which is very limited, race conditions are more an issue with concurrent programming. Parallel computing uses separate processor cores for each task so there’s less reliance on stack machines. But I guess each core still shares the memory, so maybe it still happens. Like I said, my understanding is limited. Just use rust.
You can have single threaded race conditions appear simply from inputs appearing in an unintended ordering. Or on a single core CPU, you can have one task meant to be done first take unusually long time, so the CPU gives time to another thread which finishes first but expected to finish last.