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by pjmlp 39 days ago
Because compilers are only deterministic when using ahead of time compilation, without profiling data, and always the same set of compiler flags.

Introduce dynamic compilation, profiling data, optimization passes, multiple implementations, ML driven heuristics, and getting deterministic Assembly output from a compiler starts to get harder to achieve.

1 comments

You are right about that but that's talking about what you generate but not what the output does. My point is that the compilers still designed to preserve semantic equivalence. semantic equivalence makes sense here because there are semantics well defined for both input and output. That bit is supposed to be deterministic. If something breaks that that is a bug.

I just don't think comparing with compilers is a good argument.

Semantic equivalence breaks down with UB optimizations.
and hence reading code is unnecessary because how well LLMs understand and converts my prompts is almost equivalent to how well compilers can understand programs and turn into assembly. The prompts carry equal amount of ambiguity as the prompts I would write to define the behavior and want.