What Nelson Elhage thinks about compilers

@nelson-elhage · 19 positions · On ppll ↗

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

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1 dated position, 2025, in their own words. Our reading of what Nelson Elhage has said — not written or endorsed by them.

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1. 9 Mar 2025

   Our readingCompiler mechanisms that force a required optimization to occur, rather than relying on incidental compiler behavior, are a more robust way to write performance-sensitive code.

   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