Locknote: How Badly Do We Want Correct Compilers? - John Regehr - NDC TechTown 2023

This talk was recorded at NDC Techtown in Kongsberg, Norway. #ndctechtown #ndcconferences #cplusplus #bugs #softwaredeveloper
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This talk is about compiler correctness. I will describe several efforts by my research group to detect previously unknown compiler bugs -- especially those that cause application code to be silently miscompiled.
I'll also talk how we go about reporting compiler bugs in a way that
makes them more likely to be fixed, and about various interactions that
we've had with compiler development teams. Over the past decade or so we
have reported more than 750 bugs, and we have also produced a variety of
open-source tools that developers can use on their own.

[@marcelijankowski9593]

Glad it popped up on my home page!

[@__-dy9gv]

Thank you John, I have used alive2, creduce and csmith in my job and they are awesome tools.
If we have a tool that can generalize a pattern and generating the C++ code that applies patterns. this would probably allow rewriting inst-combine automatically but better.
inst-combine as is has MANY issues that are hard to fix because of how much work it would be to rewrite inst-combine.
but if we can automate the process all those issues can be tackled.

[@aniketbisht2823]

There are people that are afraid that AI will be a threat to their jobs and then there are these really important, complicated and hard problems that needs to be solved like this one in all engineering domain. We should be excited rather skeptical if we can get any help from the AI revolution solving these problems. I wonder to what extent is AI/ML used in compiler optimization and correctness in popular compiler tool-chains like GCC and LLVM, if at all.