You misunderstand me - first, almost all modern compilers (that I know of) use SSA, so that's not much of a thing you need to point out. The point I was making, is that by looking at the assembler, it seems the generated code is totally unoptimized, even though it was mentioned that Claude implemented SSA opt passes.
The generated code's quality is more inline with 'undergrad course compiler backend', that is, basically doing as little work on the backend as possible, and always doing all the work conservatively.
Basic SSA optimizations such as constant propagation, copy propagation or common subexpression propagation are clearly missing from the assembly, the register allocator is also pretty bad, even though there are simple algorithms for that sort of thing that perform decently.
So even though the generated code works, I feel like something's gone majorly wrong inside the compiler.
The 300k LoC things isnt encouraging either, its way too much for what the code actually does.
I just want to point out, that I think a competent-ish dev (me?) could build something like this (a reasonably accurate C compiler), by a more human-in-the-loop workflow. The result would be much more reasonable code and design, much shorter, and the codebase wouldn't be full of surprises like it is now, and would conform to sane engineering practices.
Honestly I would certainly prefer to do things like this as opposed to having AI build it, then clean it up manually.
And it would be possible without these fancy agent orchestration frameworks and spending tens of thousands of dollars on API.
This is basically what went down with Cursor's agentic browser, vs an implementation that was recreated by just one guy in a week, with AI dev tools and a premium subscription.
There's no doubt that this is impressive, but I wouldn't say that agentic sofware engineering is here just yet.
The generated code's quality is more inline with 'undergrad course compiler backend', that is, basically doing as little work on the backend as possible, and always doing all the work conservatively.
Basic SSA optimizations such as constant propagation, copy propagation or common subexpression propagation are clearly missing from the assembly, the register allocator is also pretty bad, even though there are simple algorithms for that sort of thing that perform decently.
So even though the generated code works, I feel like something's gone majorly wrong inside the compiler.
The 300k LoC things isnt encouraging either, its way too much for what the code actually does.
I just want to point out, that I think a competent-ish dev (me?) could build something like this (a reasonably accurate C compiler), by a more human-in-the-loop workflow. The result would be much more reasonable code and design, much shorter, and the codebase wouldn't be full of surprises like it is now, and would conform to sane engineering practices.
Honestly I would certainly prefer to do things like this as opposed to having AI build it, then clean it up manually.
And it would be possible without these fancy agent orchestration frameworks and spending tens of thousands of dollars on API.
This is basically what went down with Cursor's agentic browser, vs an implementation that was recreated by just one guy in a week, with AI dev tools and a premium subscription.
There's no doubt that this is impressive, but I wouldn't say that agentic sofware engineering is here just yet.