ML needs a new programming language – Interview with Chris Lattner

For decades, paying for compiler tools was a thing.

I’d prefer to not touch a hot stove twice. Telling me what processors I can use is Oracle- level rent seeking, and it should be mocked just like Oracle.

True, but aren't we in a better place now? I think the move to free tools was motivated by programmers, and not by their employers. I've read that it became hard to hire people if you used proprietary tools. Even the great Microsoft open-sourced their flagship C# language. And it's ironic but telling that the developers of proprietary software don't trust proprietary tools. And every developer looks at the state of the art in proprietary engineering tooling, such as CAD, and retches a little bit. I've seen many comments on HN along those lines.

And "correlation is not causality," but the occupation with the most vibrant job market until recently was also the one that used free tools. Non-developers like myself looked to that trend and jumped on the bandwagon when we could. I'm doing things with Python that I can't do with Matlab because Python is free.

Interestingly, we may be going back to proprietary tools, if our IDE's become a "terminal" for the AI coding agents, paid for by our employers.

Not really, as many devs rediscover public domain, shareware, demos and open core, because it turns out there are bills to pay.

If you want the full C# experience, you will still be getting Windows, Visual Studio, or Rider.

VSCode C# support is under the same license as Visual Studio Community, and lack several tools, like the advanced graphical debugging for parallel code and code profiling.

The great Microsoft has not open sourced that debugger, nor many other tools on .NET ecosystem, also they can afford to subsidise C# development as gateway into Azure, and being valued in 4 trillion, the 2nd biggest in the world.

I am quite sure Larry thinks very foundly of such folks when having vacations on his yatch or paying the bills to land the private jet off airport opening times.

> If you want the full C# experience, you will still be getting Windows, Visual Studio, or Rider.

I don't believe the first two are true, and as a point of reference Rider is part of their new offerings that are free for non-commercial use https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/#:~:text=free%20for%20non-co...

I also gravely, gravely doubt the .NET ecosystem has anything in the world to do with Azure

And it sucked so hard that GNU and LLVM were born.

Prove me wrong showing how to do Sharepoint or Office 365 addons with Rider, as bonus points provide the screenshots of parallel debugging and profiling experience, alongside .NET visualizers for debugging, and a bit of hot code reloading in Windows frameworks as well.

Azure pays for .NET, and projects like Aspire.

LLVM was a research project embraced by Apple to avoid GCC and anything GPL.

Apple and Google have purged most GPL stuff out of their systems, after making clang shine.

Yes and it sucked, and those companies who relied on that largely got conned into it and then saw their tooling slowly decay and their application becomes legacy garbage.

Its not just that OS tooling is "free", it's also better and works for way longer. If you relied on proprietary Delphi-compatible tooling, well... you fucked up!

You mean like the tooling for iOS, Nintendo, PlayStation, XBox, Windows, CUDA?

Yes, and it was terrible, a bit like now the GPU compiler landscape is terrible with proprietary mutually incompatible buggy compilers and sw stacks being forced on developers.

Um... yes? If you built your app around COM+, you're fucked. I would know, I worked on an application like that. Perpetually stuck in decades long gone.

Or NextSTEP. Or DX 9. Or whatever the fuck.

That shit sucked when it came out and it's only gotten worse. The cherry on top is the companies that promised they're the bees knees actually know that, which is why they left them to die. And, unfortunately, your applications along with them.