compilers
Programs that turn programs into programs: what a compiler can name, assembly, and building one that serves an editor.
FilterEveryone, all time25 from 16 people
- DH
David Heinemeier Hansson quoted
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals
Our readingIt is shortsighted to think agentic AI will stop before it reaches the lowest layers of computing.
Their wordsMyopic to think we're going to stop the agentic drill bit until it reaches computing bedrock.
- 5 days earlier
- CW
Chris Wellons quoted
Software engineer who writes about low-level and systemsβ¦
Their wordsStrap a frontier AI into a good coding harness, show it what's broken, give it all the sources (source.tar), and ~15 minutes later I have a patch.
↗What's been going on in w64devkit the past yearnullprogram.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 6 days earlier
- GR
Guillermo Rauch quoted
CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO
Their wordsAgents are only as good as the proof-checkers, compilers, type systems, and linters you give them.
- 2 days earlier
- GR
Guillermo Rauch quoted
Their wordsAgents are the new compilers. They compile intent into fast software.
- 4 days earlier
- GR
Guillermo Rauch quoted
Their wordsThere's no excuse for software to be slow anymore. Projects like πππ and ππππππ leading with speed, compilers like πΏππππ’ππ and πππππππ that can help us upgrade entire ecosystems to native, and πππππ‘ pushing the GPU rendering speed frontier.
- 13 days earlier
- CM
Casey Muratori quoted
Game and engine programmer
Their wordsIf I look at the assembly language output from that compiler, I know exactly what the CPU is being asked to do. And it's not that hard to be able to learn to read assembly language so that you can see very quickly is the CPU being asked to do the things that I think it should be asked to do them.
↗Why performant code matters (but gets widely ignored), with Casey Muratoriyoutube.com 6th of 26 in this recording
- CM
Casey Muratori quoted
Their wordsit's really much easier if you can understand how to center a div as they say if you can vertically center a div in HTML then you can probably learn assembly language I would say
↗Why performant code matters (but gets widely ignored), with Casey Muratoriyoutube.com 7th of 26 in this recording
- CM
Casey Muratori quoted
Their wordsBut it's the cost of the compiler not being able to do any optimizations. That's the actual cost. And that cost can be severe.
↗Why performant code matters (but gets widely ignored), with Casey Muratoriyoutube.com 20th of 26 in this recording
- 3 months earlier
- KH
Kelsey Hightower quoted
Self-taught software engineer
Their wordsBut if you ever want to get better at anything, and sometimes that depth, that nuance is the thing that leads to an invention, right? If you know how a compiler works, if you know how memory management works, that might give you enough information to say, "Oh, I can make a new programming language."
↗Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightoweryoutube.com 27th of 28 in this recording
- 7 days earlier
- DR
Dax Raad quoted
Builds developer tools β SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly
Their wordsevery single dev tool we use whether it's databases, compilers, whatever eventually the open source option becomes a default option, right?
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 5th of 24 in this recording
- 7 days earlier
- AR
Alice Ryhl quoted
Software engineer on Google's Android Rust team
Their wordsI think this is kind of leads to another way that Rust really helps with reliability, which is that if you're refactoring, I think Rust is really good at telling you all the places you need to update. I've done this sometimes where I would refactor something. I change the code. I change the return type or whatever it is, and then I just fix the compiler errors and until the compiler stops shouting. And then once I've done that, I've updated every place I need to update.
↗Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com 5th of 23 in this recording
- AR
Alice Ryhl quoted
Their wordsI think the same kind of principle applies with agents in that they can talk to the compiler. It will tell them what to fix. So I guess this could be a case. We we'll see. But Rust could be a pretty promising candidate for to use for agents because they can get more feedback and it's just hard it's harder to to ship certain type of bugs or maybe impossible to have certain type of bugs.
↗Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com 21st of 23 in this recording
- 7 days earlier
- AH
Anders Hejlsberg quoted
Danish software engineer and Microsoft technical fellow
Their wordsThat was always the idea, and that that goes back even to the predecessor of Turbo Pascal, this idea that it's not just a compiler. It's an experience, right? I mean, you don't just compile your programs. You also edit them. You also run them. You also debug them. You also have a runtime library. It all has to like fit together.
↗TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsbergyoutube.com 1st of 26 in this recording
- AH
Anders Hejlsberg quoted
Their wordsAnd quite honestly, language design is 90% the same and 10% new for for pretty much every language. Every language you build still has to have a compiler. Compiler is still built in a pretty much the same way.
↗TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsbergyoutube.com 6th of 26 in this recording
- AH
Anders Hejlsberg quoted
Their wordsYou can have the compiler write the state machine. If you introduce syntax that allows you to indicate where you want to yield. And that's what await is.
↗TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsbergyoutube.com 8th of 26 in this recording
- AH
Anders Hejlsberg quoted
Their wordsAnd so everything is lazy and deferred and functional and reusable inside the compiler. And it's a very different way of writing compilers than than what the textbooks will traditionally teach you.
↗TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsbergyoutube.com 16th of 26 in this recording
- 4 weeks earlier
- KK
Kyle Kingsbury quoted
Distributed-systems safety researcher
Their wordsBecause LLMs are chaotic and natural language is ambiguous, LLMs seem unlikely to preserve the reasoning properties we expect from compilers.
↗The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: Workaphyr.com 1st of 3 in this piece
- 5 weeks earlier
- SY
Steve Yegge quoted
Software engineer of four decades who spent years at Amazon and Google
Their wordsI had a lot of my own ego and identity wrapped up in my sort of compiler background. It's all It's interesting, right? But it's it's not useful in any meaningful sense anymore.
↗From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yeggeyoutube.com 1st of 25 in this recording
- 5 weeks earlier
- SH
Scott Hanselman quoted
Programmer, teacher and speaker
Their wordsAs high-level programming cedes way to the prose compiler, making your goals and specs well understood to the ambiguity loop and showing good judgment is going to matter more than ever.
↗The danger of glamourizing one shotsfeeds.hanselman.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 8 months earlier
- DC
David Crawshaw quoted
Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale
Their wordsGPUs are not nearly as restricted in their future progress as CPUs which are far more constrained in how they can physically improve (compiler-driven ILP only goes so far).
↗How I program with Agentscrawshaw.io 1st of 2 in this piece
- 3 months earlier
- TH
ThePrimeagen quoted
Michael Paulson, known online as ThePrimeagen
Their wordsIt's just that Zig, C, C++, all those languages that were being tested, they're all LLVM backends, right? That's the one that actually turns the thing into the executable part. And if there's a variation in speed, it just means in one language you didn't quite express what you are supposed to correctly.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 16th of 31 in this recording
- 13 days earlier
- NE
Nelson Elhage quoted
Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance
Their wordsI'm hopeful this framework will turn out to be a much more robust style for writing performance-sensitive code, especially over time and as compilers evolve.
↗Performance of the Python 3.14 tail-call interpreterblog.nelhage.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 14 months earlier
- PH
Phil Hagelberg quoted
Programmer known online as technomancy
Their wordsmost macros don't actually do anything other than pure transformation of their arguments. It's almost always safe to run them during static analysis, except you don't know for sure
↗in which an escape route is discoveredtechnomancy.us 2nd of 3 in this piece
- 4 months earlier
- DH
David Heinemeier Hansson quoted
Their wordsShowing up for a fight on something so ultimately unresolvable as whether to use compiler-based type checking or not offers the thrill of hooliganism
↗Open source hooliganism and the TypeScript meltdownworld.hey.com
- 7 years earlier
- TB
Thorsten Ball quoted
Co-founder of Amp and co-host of the Raising an Agent podcast
Their wordsWhat I know and what I'm sure about is that without knowledge of parsing you won't be able to build tools like these.