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From xeiaso.netView original ↗
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I hate compilers

The author discusses the frustration that given the same bytes of input, compilers do not reliably produce the same bytes of output, highlighting the complexity and unpredictability of compilation processes.

Background

- Xe Iaso is a well-known infrastructure and programming blogger; the post is a technical rant about the unreliability of reproducible builds. - Anubis is a bot-detection system Xe built; it uses WASM (WebAssembly) components that need to be compiled from source. - The core complaint: compiling identical source code at different times (or with different toolchain versions) often produces different binaries, breaking the goal of "deterministic builds." - This matters for any project that verifies integrity via hashes (e.g., checksums in package managers or CI/CD) — if the same source doesn't always yield the same binary, you cannot trust cryptographic signatures on builds. - The note touches on deeper compiler issues: timestamps embedded by linkers, filesystem ordering differences, and non-deterministic hash maps in language runtimes.

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