The Flash C Compiler (blog.adafruit.com)

84 pointsby AlexeyBrin4 days ago39 comments

ndiddy an hour ago

I looked at the Github page and of course it's vibe coded. This is the sort of project that someone would have spent a few months doing as a learning exercise while they were reading through something like Crenshaw's "Let's Build a Compiler" series. I don't see the point of vibe coding it. You still end up with a toy compiler that nobody will actually use, except now you haven't learned anything about how compilers work. It's pointless.

skybrian 34 minutes ago

I imagine I’d learn a fair bit about how to go about vibe-coding developer tools by implementing this, so it hardly seems pointless? It seems like an interesting exercise.

flykespice 33 minutes ago

Yep, and the code is an eyesore to look at. Almost no logical separation of code blocks (everything mashed-up together) I was really expecting LLM to annotate every line of code with (useless) comments, considering many vibecoded js projects are like that.

Either my C skills are getting rusty and that is how a C codebase normally looks like, or LLM was trained on some suspicious codebases.

q4y2u35uk 24 minutes ago

No you're right, this code is terrible. Running a linter like clang-tidy would surface many issues. Not sure why the LLM didn't think of ever doing that.

foldr 7 minutes ago

I checked a few source files at random and it looked fine to me overall. It's broken down into small-to-medium sized functions, contrary to what you suggest. If your issue is just the size of the individual source files, then you can find much larger in non-vibe-coded C projects like QuickJS.

djriley 10 hours ago

This is really neat, I'll have to give it a try. I grew up on QuickBASIC, then Turbo Pascal and Turbo C later on. For my own personal hands on coding time solving mathematical challengers or working on hand coded personal projects to relax in our increasingly agent driven world I've taken to using the text mode Free Pascal ide that is bundled in with the fpc compiler, built on an open-source implementation of Borland's TurboVision DOS TUI libraries. I always wished it had a mode to emulate Turbo C as well.

The only bummer I'm seeing with fcc is not having a linker mean not being able to use external libraries. So you're really limited to what you can include in your own project, but if it truly is C89 compliant there are plenty of useful single header libraries you could use for various things.

I'll check it out!

xenophonf an hour ago

I'm not willing to whitelist whatever bullshit malware this thinly veiled advertisement wants to run on my computer before it will allow me to see the page. Can someone share a précis?

rgovostes 10 hours ago

The Adafruit post is just an LLM recap of the author's blog post, which is an LLM summary of the project, which was vibe coded with Claude. The signal:noise ratio is dropping off exponentially.

shoobiedoo 7 hours ago

Damn. I'm reading Nils Holm's book on a C subset compiler and was hoping this would be a neat supplement. Into the trashbin it goes

RetroTechie 15 minutes ago

https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap

May have what you're looking for. Steps & tools used are in the "parts.rst" file.

hn_submit 6 hours ago

Why is everyone calling LLM generated code "written from scratch" with almost no clue that they didn't write one line of code themselves? Yeah, it was written from scratch, but not by you!!

Projects like these are defiling the programmer's guild.

rowanG077 5 hours ago

Why does it matter? Tbh at this point if frontier models are used I would place more trust in the average codebase than the average pre-AI codebase.

There are outliers where an excellent team of devs produce great quality, better that even frontier LLM code now. SQLite comes to mind. But it's easy to forget that is the 0.x%.

throawayonthe 4 hours ago

the comment isn't even about the quality, it's about the "from scratch" aspect (used to 'market' it)

rowanG077 4 hours ago

But isn't that correct? It doesn't seem to be based on anything, or am I missing something?

Or is it "To make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe" kind of deal. Which doesn't make sense to me either.

FeteCommuniste 4 hours ago

If you hired a chef to come to your house and make a pie from scratch, would you then share the pie with your friends and tell them that you made it from scratch?

rowanG077 4 hours ago

No I wouldn't, but that is not really what happened here. If someone used a bread making robot and put the ingredients in there and it made bread most people would have no problem saying they made bread from scratch. In the same vein people say "I did the laundry" or "I did the dishes" but in both cases the real work is often done by a laundry machine or dishwasher.

In the same way a program manager is free to say "We build X from scratch" even though they made no code contribution to it. The we is replaced with I since no other person was involved in this case.

ranger_danger 2 hours ago

> most people would have no problem saying they made bread from scratch

That's fine for bread, but for people that see code more like art, they have a preconceived notion that "from scratch" means writing the code yourself.

Some people code to solve a problem and they don't care how it gets done. They have no problems using AI and see other methods as prehistoric. That's fine for them, carry on.

For me, the journey is more important than the destination.

Being able to code "by hand" is what strokes my sense of worth and accomplishment... knowing I can do something that not just anyone can. Pushing a button or prompting an AI isn't the same for me, that's more like a project manager and something I never want to be.

When people bash on the anti-AI crowd, they just don't understand that people code for different reasons, and neither is more right or wrong.

rowanG077 an hour ago

I agree that people can write code for whatever they want, and that is valid.

Code can be art, making food can also be art. So I'm don't agree with your distinction that code is materially different from baking.

The terminology "from scratch" and "by hand" are really not interchangeable in my opinion. "By hand" implies something about the process. "From scratch" implies something about the state before you started, not anything about the process.

JdeBP 3 hours ago

The plotline of at least one Hallmark romcom movie, as I recall. (-:

program_whiz 3 hours ago

A more apt analogy is heating up a frozen packaged pie, then saying it was made from scratch. Yes _you_ bought from the store, but somewhere ingredients were assembled and it was made "from scratch".

FeteCommuniste 4 hours ago

What does a vibe-coder say when he orders a dish at a restaurant and the waiter brings it to the table? "Look at the food I made!"

aleph_minus_one 3 hours ago

On the other hand: many managers love to claim to have been deeply involved in the development of some product when the actual work was done at least by their underlings, or sometimes even a completely different team.

If people were similar confrontive in calling out such managers ...

jhbadger an hour ago

Or any project of any size -- scientists running a lab rarely do the experiments or data analysis themselves -- they have graduate students and postdocs for that. Their job is to decide what those people work on.

aleph_minus_one 44 minutes ago

With the same argument, you can argue that it is the programmer's job to decide which LLM shall work on the problem, and the programmer still gets the credit for the work. :-)

jhbadger 38 minutes ago

Yes, that's my point -- assuming the programmer actually spent some time thinking it through.

sn0n 3 hours ago

ArtCraft says it’s all written from scratch as well.

rfgplk 2 hours ago

ArtCraft lies. It makes extensive use of crates, which to me defeats the "from scratch" argument. The whole point of doing it from scratch is that you get full control of every line of code in the compiled binary.

https://github.com/rfgplk/micron.cpp

This is an example of a true "from scratch implementation" (as long as you target the freestanding compile option, hosted still depends on pthread for threading). Absolutely zero external code or references anywhere outside the stated repo. (Not even compiler builtins or includes are needed). You can drag and drop it wherever you'd like hit compile and you're done.

rfgplk 2 hours ago

"Written from scratch" just means that no external code or existing libraries were used in producing something. Nowadays it's preferable to reusing code/crates/whatever because a) you avoid supply side attacks b) the implementation is likely going to be more correct and performant than alternatives c) it's actually easier to write your own thing than to download an existing lib and wrangle it into your project.

childintime 2 hours ago

500kB source for the compiler and half of it is for the optimizer. Could it be a nice basis for putting a new vibe coded syntax on top? Move it to Zig or Rust first?

sylware 5 hours ago

Neat, but I would keep an eye on the trend: with all this AI coding (if true) some are now going directly to assembly.

q4y2u35uk 29 minutes ago

People who think this do not understand LLMs. LLMs thrive in abstractions just like humans. Assembly code introduces far too much entropy, requires far too much context and documentation, and is far too easy to get horribly wrong. Even after generating large amounts of synthetic training data, it will never be practical.

anonymous908213 10 hours ago

> The result of the study is only a description of how the IDE looks and behaves: which menus exist and in what order, which options each dialog holds, how the Message window tracks errors, and what the diagnostics say.

LLM-generated blogpost. The stench is all over it.

lume 7 hours ago

Stop whining. LLMs are available to everyone. If you think you can do better, then go ahead and do it instead of criticizing people who are actually getting things done.

cors-fls 6 hours ago

This is not "getting things done", it is not a useful project. It is one of the interesting projects that one would do to show mastery of a hard technical topic (compiler), to learn, and to impress fellow programmers. Doing it with an LLM makes it just completely useless

ranger_danger 2 hours ago

> Doing it with an LLM makes it just completely useless

There can be other valid perspectives than your own.

Different people code for different reasons.

Some see it as a means to an end... "I want X as an end result and I don't care how I get it."

Others see it as an art form and something special to them; their sense of worth is tied to their knowledge and experience in something that not just anyone can do (without an AI).

OP uses an LLM because they just want the end result. You might write code for different reasons entirely. Neither is "wrong" or "useless."

canelonesdeverd 2 hours ago

The whining will continue until boosters get it. If the things you're "getting done" are even remotely valuable then you can spare the brainpower to use your words.

mrlonglong 6 hours ago

That's true but LLMs are a massive time saver when generating unit tests and other useful things for your work, leaving you free to write what really matters.

bayesnet 2 hours ago

Building useful tests are probably one of the things that LLMs are the worst at tbh. You end up with tests checking `2 * 2 == 4` and similar.

flykespice 21 minutes ago

Having a LLM also generate your unit tests defeats the purpose of checking whether a LLM generated piece of code is sound.

There will always need a human on the end to check if the LLM didn't hallucinate anything on it, including manually writing the unit tests.