News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Why Learn Compilers by seanmcdirmid on Monday May 29, 2023 @09:52PM (#36120334)
If you are using something like a SAT solver to produce code, non determinism might be unavoidable. Like, say the solver is heavily multi threaded for perf reasons (these things are slow right?). Or I guess, any FPGA compiler would fit that mold also.

Or anything that compiles a corpus into a model, though we typically call that training rather than compilation :).

Re:Why Learn Compilers by eru on Monday May 29, 2023 @10:21PM (#36120480)
Parallel computing can still produce deterministic outcomes, if you are careful.

Having said that, most people are not careful, and most languages make it very hard to be careful.

The keyword is 'deterministic parallelism', if you want to look into the research. See eg https://www.well-typed.com/blog/2012/12/deterministic-parall...

Re:Why Learn Compilers by seanmcdirmid on Monday May 29, 2023 @10:42PM (#36120593)
Deterministic parallelism has a non-trivial cost that can negate the perf you were hoping to gain by using multiple cores (or even GPU cores) in parallel.