Mastodawn

Almost 20 years ago (!) I opined: "C is the New Assembly", suggesting that we had moved beyond the need to optimize things by writing assembly code. If I wrote the same article today, it might be "Hand-written Code is the New Assembly" https://redsweater.com/blog/278/c-is-the-new-assembly

C Is The New Assembly –

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Ross Wintle Mar 2

@danielpunkass It’s not the same though. C to assembly is a deterministic process with verifiably-correct output. English to C (or whatever) via LLM is a non-deterministic process using imprecise language.

I don’t need to know assembly because the process is precise. How many people check that their compiler output the correct binary?

With LLMs I need some way to verify correctness. How would your new article account for that difference?

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Ross Wintle

@danielpunkass (Aside: I have worked on aerospace projects where we did literally verify that the compiler output was correct. It always was. The one failure I remember finding was actually in a processor, not the compiler!)