Chris Lattner

And then I got to include standardio.h.

And all of the headers in the world use all the GCC stuff.

And so, again, come back away from theory back to reality, right?

I was at a fork in the road.

I could have built an amazingly beautiful academic thing that nobody would ever use.

Or I could say, well, it's yucky in various ways.

All these design mistakes, accents of history, the legacy.

At that point, GCC was, like, over 20 years old.

Which, by the way, now LLVM's over 20 years old, right?

So it's funny how time catches up to you, right?

And so you say, okay, well...

what what is easier right i mean as an engineer it's it's actually much easier for me to go implement long tail compatibility weird features even if they're distasteful and just do the hard work and like figure it out reverse engineer understand what it is write a bunch of test cases like try to understand behavior it's way easier to do all that work as an engineer than it is to go talk to all c programmers and get argue with them and try to get them to rewrite their code

Right.

Because that breaks a lot more things.

Yeah.

And you have realities like nobody actually even understands how the code works because it was written by the person who quit 10 years ago.

Right.

And so this software is kind of frustrating that way, but that's how the world works.

Well, there are occasions in which you get a build, like you invent a new data structure or something like that, or there's this beautiful algorithm that just makes you super happy.

I love that moment.