Reading this, I think low level engineering is actually more dependent on specific environments. Hardware also has its own points of change. Usually, when you think at a high level, environmental changes are less significant than you might expect. But low level thinking tends to be tied to specific environments, which is what makes it difficult. The reason low level is hard is that even if the code itself is short, the hidden assumptions inside it are difficult and place a heavy cognitive load on the programmer. For example, even a short snippet in C like `int value = (int)buffer` requires a lot of implicit knowledge about the 4 byte alignment of the buffer, or whether int is exactly 32 bits. LLMs do not seem to be very good at knowing these things. Rather, they are strong at high level wrapping, but at the low level, they seem surprisingly difficult and somewhat useless. Hardware has CPU generation changes, and in the case of PLCs, where I mainly work, the protocol differences between vendors are far too severe. There does not seem to be any technology with a very long lifecycle.

Nix also needs the build output to be deterministic to calculate the hash. It also has the problems of timestamps etc. The build environment tries to be hermetic by setting the time to be epoch among other things.

These seem very reasonable, the workarounds used are natural, and overall the article is not at all congruous with the conclusion in the (clickbait?) title?

Compilers literally made your project possible!

Time date env variables and random address... Is also input data, maybe not as a flag but still

The Birth and Death of Javascript really had the gift of prophecy, eh

If Clang generated non-deterministic output due to pointer addresses then that's a bug (happens regularly) that should be fixed. The most common way this happens if it some code path is iterating over a DenseMap which is non-deterministic. Sometimes that's fine and sometimes that's not depending on how that map is used. The common way to fix that is to switch to a MapVector which pays some additional runtime/memory cost to guarantee deterministic iteration order.

To avoid all those grotesque and absurd compilers and runtimes, more for those of computer languages with a ultra-complex syntax (c++ and similar), I now design "binary specifications" which I "design" and "validate" with RISC-V assembly coding.

Here, since any whatwg cartel web engine is an issue, the author should not bother.

> lol you'd think, but no, it's not. In theory it is (and for small scale compilers it definitely is), but in practice compilers are strange and complicated beasts containing multitudes that no mere mortal can fully comprehend on their own.

Umm there are like 60,000 lit tests checked into LLVM that verify that the output is absolutely a deterministic function of the input of at least that compiler.

> Even though the source code had the same bytes, the output of the compiler was wildly different.

This is the goofiest I've seen written unironically in quite a long - the C preprocessor is not part of the compiler. The pre in preprocessor should probably give it away.

Just a tip: you should probably actually understand something before you decide you hate it.

As long as the program is equivalent there isn't an actual problem here. Requiring the output to always be the same is an arbitrary restriction.

If you want to have users trust that someone else hasn't modified it, then sign it with your identity.

LLMs should be trained on and directly output binary.