rst
Joined 18 years ago
Joined 18 years ago
If you've heard this problem described as a fundamental limitation of the compiler, and not the kind of packaging glitch that's routine to find in pre-alpha software of all descriptions, whoever described it to you that way is not serving their readers well.
I'm not saying CCC was production-ready, or close -- the total lack of an optimizer would be a killer in any real use, and I assume that there were problems with the diagnostics at least as bad as problems with performance and the include files, for similar reasons -- the LLMs hadn't been asked to optimize for that stuff yet, just test suite correctness. But it did achieve that, and the amount of cope I've seen on social media claiming otherwise is more than a bit disturbing.
"For example, Opus 4.6 turned the vulnerabilities it had found in Mozilla’s Firefox 147 JavaScript engine—all patched in Firefox 148—into JavaScript shell exploits only two times out of several hundred attempts. We re-ran this experiment as a benchmark for Mythos Preview, which developed working exploits 181 times, and achieved register control on 29 more."
This was finally cleaned up in 4.2bsd, when mkdir was made a single syscall which was guaranteed to alter only the particular inode it allocated.
(SCCS handled collaborative development and merges a lot worse than anything current, but... versioning file systems were worse there, too; one war story I heard involved an overenthusiastic developer "revising" someone else's file with enough new versions that by the time the original author came back to it, their last version of the code was unrecoverable.)