I always think the determinism discourse on LLMs is off the point. The elephant in the room is semantic preservation. Compilers can most often preserve semantics across abstractions, while LLMs most often cannot.

For sure the problem isn't that clear-cut, for the siren's call of AI coding is to induce a system out of prompts with ambiguous semantics. It's hardly surprisingly you get unpredictable outcomes when giving ambiguous commands to human collaborators, and that in the case of LLMs they resolve ambiguity with probabilistic approximation.

I thought the whole idea is that we have programming languages because turning a rigidly defined language (like C) into another rigidly defined language (like machine code) is relatively simple.

Turning an ambiguous language with no formal definitions(like English) into one that does is a very hard problem.

You can think of comptime (as of zig 0.16) as an interpreter that evaluates code with very limited optimization. So yes, naive use of comptime can definitely grind compilation to a halt.

Zig tackles the halting problem a bit differently by putting the evaluation cutoff in userspace through the compiler builtin function `@setEvalBranchQuota`. You bump up the quota as you see fit.

Did Putin do anything meaningful to stop "NATO's advance" into the Baltic Sea? Maybe Putin was so pacifist that he let Sweden and Finland join the NATO with impunity.

Come back when Americans are routinely jailed for rubbing their elites the wrong way (in some countries, criticisms aren't the only way to rub the leaders the wrong way)

I believe China only got this huge because all its neighours couldn't help joining the peaceful middle realm \s

IMO "level" roughly corresponds to the amount of runtime control flow hidden by abstractions. Zig is famous for having almost no hidden runtime control flow, this appears pretty "low level" to many. OTOH, Zig can have highly non-trivial hidden compile time control flow thanks to comptime reflection, but hardly anyone identifies Zig as a "high level" metaprogramming language.

Then it's actually the immature zig ecosystem that rubbed the author the wrong way, not zig the language itself. Not that the ecosystem isn't important, but IMO a language only truly fails you when it doesn't offer the composability and performance characteristics necessary for your solution.

Well, Xi Jinping and his lackeys are known for their poor educational background, maybe not quite well known in the West.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSYQpaAI90A

It's more like driving across country vs firing a missile with you being the warhead...

Can't take this lib seriously when there're lots of gems like these in the codebase.

  // Open source directory
      dir_t* dir = open_dir(source_dir);

  // Find where dot is
      char* dot = strrchr(file, '.');

I thought ShowHN had banned LLM-generated contents, I can't be more wrong.