Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. A lot of people didn’t survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my account’s cake day, too, so that’s cool.)
Anthropic doesn’t pay me and I’m not going to look over their pile of garbage for free, but just looking at the structure and READMEs it looks like a reasonable submission for an advanced student in a compiler’s course: lowering to IR, SSA representation, dominators, phi elimination, some passes like strength reduction. The register allocator is very bad though, I’d expect at least something based on colouring.
The READMEs are also really annoying to read. They are overlong and they don’t really explain what is going on in the module. There’s no high-level overview of the architecture of the compiler. A lot of it is just redundant. Like, what is this:
Ye dude, of course it doesn’t depend on the IR, because this is before IR is constructed. Are you just pretending to know how a compiler works? Wait, right, you are, you’re a bot. The last sentence is also hilarious, my brother in christ, what, why is this in the README.
Now this evaluation only makes sense if the compiler actually works - which it doesn’t. Looking at the filed issues there are glaring disqualifying problems (#177, #172, #171, #167, etc. etc. etc.). Like, those are not “oops, forgot something”, those are “the code responsible for this is broken”. Some of them look truly baffling, like how do you manage to get so many issues of the type “silently does something unexpected on error” when the code is IN RUST, which is explicitly designed to make those errors as hard as possible? Like I’m sorry, but the ones below? These are just “you did not even attempt to fulfill the assignment”.
It’s also not tested, it has no integration tests (even though the README says it does), which is plain unacceptable. And the unit tests that are there fail so lol, lmao.
It’s worse than existing industry compilers and it doesn’t offer anything interesting in terms of the implementation. If you’re introducing your own IR and passes you have to have a good enough reason to not just target LLVM. Cranelift is… not great, but they at least have interesting design choices and offer quick unoptimized compilation. This? The only reason you’d write this is you were indeed a student learning compilers, in which case it’d be a very good experience. You’d probably learn why testing is important for the rest of your life at least.