News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Claude's C Compiler vs. GCC by bgirard on Monday February 09, 2026 @03:09AM (#46942830)
That's true and I fully agree. I don't think LLMs' progress in writing a toy C compiler diminishes the achievements that the GCC project did.

But also we've just witnessed LLMs go from being a glorified line auto-complete tool to it writing a C compiler in ~3 years. And I think that's something. And noting how we keep moving the goal post.

Re:Claude's C Compiler vs. GCC by direwolf20 on Monday February 09, 2026 @06:34AM (#46944131)
GP: "it didn't write a C compiler, it copied other compilers. Writing one from scratch is a lot harder."

You: "but look! It wrote a C compiler!"

Re:Claude's C Compiler vs. GCC by bwfan123 on Monday February 09, 2026 @12:37PM (#46948190)
The pattern matching rote-student is acing the class. No surprises here. There is no need to understand the subject from first principles to ace tests. Majority of high-school and college kids know this.