Claude's C Compiler

“the LLM wrote a toy version of something for which there are hundreds of undergraduate GitHub repositories in its training data”

“Anthropic using agents to build a semi-unusable compiler is far more of an achievement”

“It could compile the full linux kernel afaik.”

“For faffing about with a multi agent system that seems like a pretty successful experiment to me.”

“it built versions of postgresql, redis, and several other things which passed their test suites completely”

“this compiler generated by Claude is pretty good for learning”

“A small toy compiler is way better than any book”

“The code is very readable and very easy to understand.”

“a great signal of agent orchestration, logevity of tasks, etc, but the messaging is "Software is Over"”

“Streching the definition of "working", especially in times where code quality is going down, does not help.”

“it seems the generated code is totally unoptimized, even though it was mentioned that Claude implemented SSA opt passes”

“It seems earth shattering that an AI can write a C compiler in the first place.”

“it's an amazing test of the abilities of the models to deliver a working C-compiler”

“All of this work is extraordinarily impressive.”

“$20k in tokens to get to a foundation for a new compiler with the feature set of this one is a bargain”

“Is it correctly compiling it? Several people have pointed out that the compiler will not emit errors for clearly invalid code.”

“The initial blog describes a painstaking process involved in producing a toy C compiler with quite a bit of human intervention.”

“This was the equivalent of a "weekend project", and it's amazing”

“I believe the Claude C Compiler is an extraordinary research result.”

“It works. It's not perfect, but anthropic claims to have successfully compiled and booted 3 different configurations with it.”

“good example of how LLMs navigate complex, non-linear spaces”

“This compiler can compile and run doom.”

“Lack of errors is not an indicator of correct compilation.”

“genuinely impressive for a compiler built entirely by an AI”

“CCC was and is a marketing stunt for a new model launch. Impressive, but still suffers from the same 80:20 rule.”

“It had to figure out lots and lots of problems along the way to get to the point of tests passing.”

“the CCC compiled runtime for SQLite could potentially run up to 158,000 times slower than a GCC compiled one”

“Claude's C compiler that had gcc as an oracle and still performs worse than gcc without any optimizations?”

“They set out to build a C compiler that could compile the kernel, it can do that just fine?”

“This is not a good implementation decision for a compiler which is not the C compiler distributed with the OS.”

“this compiler is far too lenient on what it accepts to the point where I'd hesitate to call it a C compiler”

“I feel like I could have done this in a much shorter time, for much less tokens, but still very impressive!”

“This compiler is both slower than gcc even when optimising”

“This was far more challenging task than the browser thing, because of how far few open source compilers are there.”

“Even with all optimizations enabled, it outputs less efficient code than GCC with all optimizations disabled”

“it's objectively impressive that it can be done at all, but it's not impressive from the standpoint of doing stuff that nearly all real-world users will want it to do”

“The compiler itself is entirely functional; it just can't generate code optimal enough to fit within the constraints”

“Here, they wrote a C compiler that is at least sometimes reliant on having a different C compiler around.”

“Writing a C compiler that can compile a significant amount of real software across multiple architectures?”

“The generated code is not very efficient. Even with all optimizations enabled, it outputs less efficient code than GCC with all optimizations disabled.”