> I wonder how well an LLM would do for a new CPU architecture for which no C compiler exists yet, just assembler.
Quite well, possibly.
Look, I wasn't even aware of this until it popped up a few days ago on HN, I am not privy to the details of Anthropics engineers in general, or the specific engineer who curated this marathon multi-agent dev cycle, but I can tell you how anyone familiar with compilers or programming language development will proceed:
1. Vibe an IL (intermediate language) specification into existence (even if it is only held in RAM as structures/objects)
2. Vibe some utility functions for the IL (dump, search, etc)
3. Vibe a set of backends, that take IL as input and emit ISA (Instruction Set Architecture), with a set of tests for each target ISA
4. Vibe a front-end that takes C language input and outputs the IL, with a set of tests for each language construct.
(Everything from #2 onwards can be done in parallel)
I have no reason to believe that the engineer who vibe-coded CCC is anything other than competent and skillful, so lets assume he did at least the above (TBH, he probably did more)[1].
This means that CCC has, in its code, everything needed to vibe a never-before-seen ISA, given the ISA spec. It also means it has everything needed to support a new front-end language as long as it is similar enough to C (i.e. language constructs can map to the IL constructs).
So, this should be pretty easy to expand on, because I find it unlikely that the engineer who supervised/curated the process would be anything less than an expert.
The only flaw in my argument is that I am assuming that effort from CC was so large because it did the src -> IL -> ISA route. If my assumption is wrong, it might be well-nigh impossible to add support for a new ISA.
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[1] When I agreed to a previous poster on a previous thread that I can recreate the functionality of CCC for $20k, these are the steps I would have followed, except I would not have LLM-generated anything.
alt Hacker News
> I wonder how well an LLM would do for a new CPU architecture for which no C compiler exists yet, just assembler.
Quite well, possibly.
Look, I wasn't even aware of this until it popped up a few days ago on HN, I am not privy to the details of Anthropics engineers in general, or the specific engineer who curated this marathon multi-agent dev cycle, but I can tell you how anyone familiar with compilers or programming language development will proceed:
1. Vibe an IL (intermediate language) specification into existence (even if it is only held in RAM as structures/objects)
2. Vibe some utility functions for the IL (dump, search, etc)
3. Vibe a set of backends, that take IL as input and emit ISA (Instruction Set Architecture), with a set of tests for each target ISA
4. Vibe a front-end that takes C language input and outputs the IL, with a set of tests for each language construct.
(Everything from #2 onwards can be done in parallel)
I have no reason to believe that the engineer who vibe-coded CCC is anything other than competent and skillful, so lets assume he did at least the above (TBH, he probably did more)[1].
This means that CCC has, in its code, everything needed to vibe a never-before-seen ISA, given the ISA spec. It also means it has everything needed to support a new front-end language as long as it is similar enough to C (i.e. language constructs can map to the IL constructs).
So, this should be pretty easy to expand on, because I find it unlikely that the engineer who supervised/curated the process would be anything less than an expert.
The only flaw in my argument is that I am assuming that effort from CC was so large because it did the src -> IL -> ISA route. If my assumption is wrong, it might be well-nigh impossible to add support for a new ISA.
------------------------------
[1] When I agreed to a previous poster on a previous thread that I can recreate the functionality of CCC for $20k, these are the steps I would have followed, except I would not have LLM-generated anything.