alt Hacker NewsDeterminism may be required for some compiler use cases, such as reproducible builds, and several replies have pointed that out. My point isn't that determinism is unimportant, but that it isn't intrinsic to compilation itself.
There are legitimate compiler use cases e.g. search‑based optimization, superoptimization, diversification etc where reproducibility is not the main constraint. It's worth leaving conceptual space for those use cases rather than treating deterministic output as a defining property of all compilers
Given the same inputs, the desire for search-based optimization, superoptimization, or diversification should still be predictable and deterministic, even if it produces something that is initially unanticipated. It makes no sense that that a given superoptimization search would produce different output—would determine some other method is now more optimized than another—if the initial input and state is exactly the same. It is either the most optimal given the inputs and the state or it is not.
You are attempting to hedge and leave room for a non-deterministic compiler, presumably to argue that something like vibe-compilation is valuable. However, you've offered no real use cases for a non-deterministic compiler, and I assert that such a tool would largely be useless in the real world. There is already a huge gap between requirements gathering, the expression of those requirements, and their conversion into software. Adding even more randomness at the layer of translating high level programming languages into low level machine code would be a gross regression.