Show HN: A C++ Compiler That Is Faster Than GCC and Clang

Posted by vishvananda on Thursday November 05, 2026 @12:22PM
from the show-hn dept.

https://github.com/vishvananda/cppgm-extended

I've been working on a scaffold to teach an agent how to build a self-hosting C++ Compiler from scratch for the past 6 months. One of my recent agent-runs recently achieved self-hosting for less than $500 in API tokens, but the most interesting part is that the reference implementation (which takes the best ideas from every run) can now compile C++ code 4x faster than GCC and Clang.

( 3 comments | 2 points | on HN )

Re:Show HN: A C++ Compiler That Is Faster Than GCC and Clang by spacedcowboy on Thursday November 05, 2026 @12:45PM (#50382013)

Whereas this is very impressive, I feel “faster than” should be called out as “faster to compile than”. It’s generated code seems “on a par with”.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: A C++ Compiler That Is Faster Than GCC and Clang by vishvananda on Thursday November 05, 2026 @01:05PM (#50382231)

Yes, agreed. "Faster to compile" can also be interpreted as the time to compile the compiler itself, so rather than try to disambiguate in the title, I just went with the short version.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: A C++ Compiler That Is Faster Than GCC and Clang by spacedcowboy on Friday November 06, 2026 @03:59AM (#50389872)

Oh I appreciate you were totally up-front with the numbers in the post, didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I just think “X is faster” when referring to compilers generally means the resulting executables are faster - maybe that’s just me :)

I use ‘faster’in that sense with my own compiler… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50380978

[ Parent | on HN ]