Path: csiph.com!weretis.net!feeder9.news.weretis.net!news.misty.com!news.iecc.com!.POSTED.news.iecc.com!nerds-end From: Derek Newsgroups: comp.compilers Subject: Re: Paper: Magellan: Autonomous Discovery of Novel Compiler Optimization Heuristics with AlphaEvolve Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2026 17:37:42 +0000 Organization: Compilers Central Sender: johnl%iecc.com Approved: comp.compilers@iecc.com Message-ID: <26-02-001@comp.compilers> References: <26-01-006@comp.compilers> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Injection-Info: gal.iecc.com; posting-host="news.iecc.com:2001:470:1f07:1126:0:676f:7373:6970"; logging-data="28218"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@iecc.com" Keywords: optimize Posted-Date: 01 Feb 2026 21:48:02 EST X-submission-address: compilers@iecc.com X-moderator-address: compilers-request@iecc.com X-FAQ-and-archives: http://compilers.iecc.com In-Reply-To: <26-01-006@comp.compilers> Xref: csiph.com comp.compilers:3713 John, A paper with "novel" in the title is a major red flag. > This Google paper describes an AI approach to invent new compiler > optimizations. No they don't. They use an LLM to select the tuning parameters for a well established optimization, function inlining. > surpass expert baselines. In LLVM function inlining, Magellan synthesizes > new heuristics that outperform decades of manual engineering for both > binary-size reduction and end-to-end performance. "... the continued Gemini-3-Pro run achieves consistent positive speedups beyond 0%, ultimately surpassing the hand- tuned baseline by 0.61%." Figure 3/4 suggests a much bigger improvement, until the reader realises that the comparison is not against human generated rules. Results given to two decimal places and no error bars! > In register allocation, > it learns a concise priority rule for live-range processing that matches > intricate human-designed policies on a large-scale workload. This sentence in the abstract goes undiscussed in the paper, which only looks at inlining.