• Mikina@programming.dev
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      3 days ago

      What was the non-determinism in compilers? Honest question. Like, where does it comes from?

      If you had a bug in a compiler, and a code that caused it, would it, for the same input and architecture only show some of the time? Does it included randomness in how it handles output?

      Being bug-ridden is not the same as non-determinstic, if you can reproduce the bug everywhere and thus fix it, so I’m honestly curious where would the non-determinism of compilers come from.

        • tyler@programming.dev
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          3 days ago

          Frankly, compilers come pretty close to reaching the necessary complexity to be practically non-deterministic; anyone who had never spent days banging their head against code that works perfectly with debug enabled but fails utterly when compiled with release optimisations, but only when two logically entirely unrelated pieces of code happen to be written in a particular order, and then only if interrupts are enabled on the target… Well, anyone who hasn’t been through that has no business calling themselves a software engineer - and certainly no business telling other software engineers what tools they are allowed to use.

          that is still deterministic… you don’t understand what deterministic means.

          go ahead and show us an llm that is deterministic with a parameter passed to the inference engine. I’ll wait.

            • tyler@programming.dev
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              2 days ago

              Anyone claiming to do “real programming” shouldn’t be listened to. It’s incredibly clear you don’t know what deterministic means.