Show HN: Rust compiler in PHP emitting x86-64 executables
github.comI think people don't really realise that compilers are "difficult" projects in the same way as an appendicectomy is for a skilled surgeon, i.e. the surgery is "routine" only because the surgeons spent decades honing their skills to do these routinely. The hard part was training someone to be able to do that.
Writing a compiler/interpreter is _extremely_ straightforward; a lexer -> parser -> ast -> semantic analysis -> {codegen -> linker | evaluator} pipeline is a very widely understood and tested way to write a compiler in any language, regardless of what language you are trying to compile. The hard part is _learning_ how it works, but after that implementing a compiler is a kind of mechanical activity. That's why LLMs are so great at writing parsers: they can just read the source of any compiler (and they probably read all of them) and apply the same stuff mechanically, with almost a 100% accuracy. We even have formal languages to define parsers and RTL and stuff, that's how "mechanical" the whole process can be.
I'm pretty sure that any skilled compiler dev with the ISO C standard and a few packs of Red Bulls can apecode a working C compiler in a few days, give or take. The hard part isn't doing that, the hard part is the decades of iterative improvements to make it generate extremely performant yet correct code as fast as possible.
This is the first time I've heard the term 'apecode', and I will make sure to use it at every opportunity.
It is not mine unfortunately, it comes from a very funny write-up by rsaksida: https://rsaksida.com/blog/ape-coding/
I bet claude was hyping this guy up as he was building it. "Absolutely, a rust compiler written in PHP is a great idea!"
Does it matter who the sycophant was or just that there was a sycophant?
My partner does that as well as LLMs at this point; "Sure honey, I remember you've talked a lot about Rust and about Clojure in the past, and you seem excited about this Clojure-To-Rust transpiler you're building, it sounds like a great idea!", is that bad too?
Every compiler in any language for any language has at the very least educational value.
On the other hand, demeaning comments without any traces of constructive criticism don't have any value.
There is no comment on whether LLMs/agents have been used. I feel like projects should explicitly say if they were _or_ were not used. There is no license file, and no copyright header either. This feels like "fauxpen-source": imagine getting LEX+YACC to generate a parser, and presenting the generated C code as "open-source".
This is just another way to throw binaries over the wire, but much worse. This has the _worst_ qualities of the GPL _and_ pseudo-free-software-licenses (i.e. the EULAs used by mongo and others). It has all the deceptive qualities of the latter (e.g. we are open but not really -- similar to Sun Microsystems [love this company btw, in spite of its blunders], trying to convince people that NeWS is "free" but that the cost of media [the CD-ROM] is $900), with the viral qualities of the former (e.g. the fruit of the poison tree problem -- if you use this in your code, then not only can you not copyright the code, but you might actually be liable for infringement of copyright and/or patents).
I would appreciate it if the contributor, mrconter11, would treat HN as an internet space filled with intelligent thinking people, and not a bunch of shallow and mindless rubes. (Please (1) explicitly disclose both the use and absence of use of LLMs -- people are more likely to use your software this way, and preserves the integrity of the open source ecosystem, and (2) share you prompts and session).
So passes the glory of open source.
According to his Readme he seems to have built a 3D engine completely from scratch 8 years ago without using any library:
https://github.com/mrconter1/IntuitiveEngine
> A simple 3D engine made only with 2D drawLine functions.
That is (slightly) reassuring (but the rest of his portfolio does not inspire confidence). Nevertheless, we should be required to disclose whether the code has been (legally) tainted or not. This will help people make informed decisions, and will also help people replace the code if legal consequences appear on the horizon, or if they are ready to move from prototype to production.
Slightly?
> Useful if you need to compile Rust on a shared hosting server from 2008 where the only installed runtime is PHP.
Not sure if it was meant as a joke or not, but this cracked me up
The code style seems to be targeting some old version of PHP...but I'm absolutely sure typed properties require a newer version of PHP than existed in 2008. (If I recall correctly, that's around the days of PHP 5.4 or so)
Next: A wordpress plugin to compile Firefox to WASM.
You never know what’s going on in someone else’s Claude Max plan =D
Interesting that both you and nxtfari made essentially the same comment within an hour of each other, though yours is slightly modified
Yeah, right? Are we just... talking with bots?
That's a collision of 64 letters of entropy within 20 mins.
Searching the term on DDG return this very page as the only result, I can confirm it's not a common term/meme.
We're living on a dead Internet are we?
Maybe~ :)
well there is a context to this of people doing ridiculous projects just because they can through LLMs, of which Claude excels at for code-writing, so it makes sense that two users would have a similar reaction to this. also copying jokes from other people is as old as time (just check youtube comments from 2008)
It's pretty obvious that Anthropic has a bot army that advertises Claude in basically every post, I thought most people would've noticed by now.
I don't think it's obvious. A likelier explanation is just that a lot of people are using Claude (especially HN types). Do you have any actual evidence?
You can explain away any obvious astroturfing campaign with "wow, so many people love this product and feel the need to bring it up all the time in unrelated contexts!" if you want to.
If you think two people making the exact same comment about "Claude Max" (not even just Claude, specifically bringing up the $200 subscription) on an unrelated post is organic, I don't know what to tell you.
nxtfari is a less than half a year old account...
Just another glitch in the matrix. Guess whst chances were that this happend by pure coincidence. Dead Internet Theory is real.
you never know what’s going on in someone else’s claude max plan
This answer is LLM generated.
Are all PHP developers named Rasmus?
I also for a second thought this was Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP. In my head I just have him as Rasmus L-something, so this guy was just a hash collision. :)
Here I thought my experiment with pushing xz to compress Alpine binaries harder was a waste of time / tokens
Sometimes when doing offensive security work you end up in the strangest environments with limited tools, odd quirks, broken shells, and god knows what else. But you know what is almost always available and just works? PHP.
Nop. awk, bash or some POSIX shell certainly. Perl most likely, despite it’s plunge in popularity. On a modern Mac, awk, bash and Perl are preinstalled with the system. PHP is not even necessarily present at system level on a PHP dev box as it might be only installed in some container.
I wonder if the compiler runs on https://github.com/VKCOM/kphp (a PHP->C++ transpiler)
interesting proof of concept, in php, who would have thought :D
I think that proof of concepts are PHP’s greatest strength, actually.
These days it can be almost as strict as you want it to be, but it’s always been a “loose” enough language that you can implement things that work in very fragile ways and iterate at incredible speed.
When I am designing PoC microservices that will eventually end up running as Go or Rust, I often start with a prototype in PHP.
Now just need to figure out how to compile PHP with PHP.