[Ace17]

Non-deterministic compilation would be pretty bad.

First, producing different outputs from the same input brings the question of caching tools (e.g ccache, FastBuild), who assume the compiler is a pure function of its inputs.

Moreover, assuming your code and the compiler are correct, you might still end-up with a situation where the performance of the resulting binary differs depending on the planet's alignment at build time.

Worse: when the input code is wrong (which does happens when you're writing new code and trying it on your machine) : you build your code locally, and you're in "luck", as the compiler generates binary code "that won't crash". So you push your modifications, and then you start getting complaints from your coworkers, because they pulled your commit and now they're getting crashes. At this moment you don't know what's happening yet, so you might even tell them "it works on my machine, did you try to rebuild all?". And this might appear to solve the issue, if this time your coworkers are "lucky"!

Finally, let's suppose your code is correct, but the compiler has a code generation bug. Have you ever tried, as a user, to diagnose a compiler bug? You spent many hours trying to minimize the input file that triggers the bug, so it's executable without needing the rest of your project, so you can send it to the compiler devs. I wouldn't even try to do this if I knew the compiler was non-deterministic.

In short, non-deterministic compilation is an invitation for trouble and confusion.

[MaXtreeM]

I always thought that big compilers (clang/gcc/msvc) have some degree of non-determinism due to myriad of optimization passes in combination with heuristics deciding when and where to use certain kind of optimization. Is that true or not?

And certainly if you define deterministic compilation as always producing the same binary, this is already broken by compiler macros like "__DATE__" and randomly generated names during link-time optimization. [1]

[1] https://blog.conan.io/2019/09/02/Deterministic-builds-with-C...

[loeg]

It's not true. They are usually deterministic for the purpose of reproducibility. The same compiler version, flags, and sources should produce the same binary.

Yes, __DATE__ in sources can break reproducibility. That does not mean compilers get carte blanche to be nondeterministic.

[hathawsh]

I would think that profile-guided optimization (PGO) also makes compilation nondeterministic (unless the profile is stored for reuse.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profile-guided_optimization

I've been enabling PGO when building Python lately and I imagine the resulting binaries are a little different every time due to random events during profiling.

[Luker88]

Except that gcc and clang are nondeterministic, to an extent

Sometimes the compiler needs to generate a random value and base part of the compilation on that value. Thins like trying to predict which is the best branch, or things done at compile time.

A lot of work has been done to reduce the nondeterminism, and some of it can only be reduced by using things like "-frandom-seed=$your_git_commit" for example

build determinism also goes deeper than that, for example static libraries are archives that include the date of the archive creation, and so on

The simplest programs might generate the same hash, but don't expect all code to generate the same-hash binary by default

[tom_mellior]

> Sometimes the compiler needs to generate a random value and base part of the compilation on that value.

As a compiler engineer with experience (among others) in LLVM and GCC this is the first time I'm hearing of this. Could you provide more details or a source?

I can't imagine where such behavior would be useful, let alone required. The only slightly plausible scenario I can think of would be representing some internal data structures as hash tables with random seeds to avoid denial-of-service attacks. But then the compiled code would still have to rely on, at some point, picking an arbitrary element out of such a hash table. I can't think of contexts inside a compiler where this would be a useful thing to do.

[Luker88]

No experience here, but from the manpage:

-frandom-seed=string

  This option provides a seed that GCC uses in place of random numbers in generating certain symbol names that have to be different in every compiled file.  It is also used to place unique stamps in coverage data files and the object files that produce them.  You can use the -frandom-seed option to produce reproducibly identical object files.

though my example/guess on branch prediction is probably wrong

[tom_mellior]

Ah, thanks. Looks like this only applies to symbol names, so the generated executable code should be deterministic, only symbol table entries might differ.

[loeg]

> The simplest programs might generate the same hash, but don't expect all code to generate the same-hash binary by default

Debian and others have put quite a lot of work into reproducible software builds:

https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds#Even_more

This of course only works if the compiler cooperates.

The bug linked earlier is a regression in Clang 10. Clang 9 was deterministic for the same file, flags, etc.

[saagarjha]

> First, producing different outputs from the same input brings the question of caching tools (e.g ccache, FastBuild), who assume the compiler is a pure function of its inputs.

Why should they have to? Shouldn’t they just be able to reach for any valid compilation of this particular object file and slot it in?

> Moreover, assuming your code and the compiler are correct, you might still end-up with a situation where the performance of the resulting binary differs depending on the planet's alignment at build time.

This is already the case due to your environment. If you have the wrong number of environment variables you might penalize your program’s performance by a significant amount already just because you misalign the stack!

> At this moment you don't know what's happening yet, so you might even tell them "it works on my machine, did you try to rebuild all?". And this might appear to solve the issue, if this time your coworkers are "lucky"!

This sounds like the situation already with nondeterministic bugs like races, albeit with the same binary?

> Have you ever tried, as a user, to diagnose a compiler bug? You spent many hours trying to minimize the input file that triggers the bug, so it's executable without needing the rest of your project, so you can send it to the compiler devs.

I deal with nondeterministic programs all the time…they’re a bit more difficult to file bugs for, but it’s still possible.