The Flash C Compiler
blog.adafruit.com67 points by AlexeyBrin 4 days ago
67 points by AlexeyBrin 4 days 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!
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.
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
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.
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%.
the comment isn't even about the quality, it's about the "from scratch" aspect (used to 'market' it)
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.
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?
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.
> 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 ties my sense of worth and accomplishment to my "craft." 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.
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".
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!"
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 ...
Neat, but I would keep an eye on the trend: with all this AI coding (if true) some are now going directly to assembly.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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