alt Hacker NewsI'd copy and paste from all the thousands of open source ones, what do you mean?
There are plenty of open source compilers that I can copy and paste whatever I need to. I don't get why you think this would have any level of difficulty?
Of course I couldn't make a brand new compiler that was better than what's out there...
Just like a game engine, I could clone one of the thousands of engines out there pretty easily - making something better or novel would be difficult. Just making a bare bones clone of what already exists by referencing documentation and pre-existing code is relatively easy now.
Yeah, when I made a mediocre 3d game engine 20 years ago, it was brain breaking difficult work. I can make one infinitely better in a micro fraction of the time now because most of the hard stuff is done and can just be looked up now.
Do you not agree?
If you copy and paste an entire compiler you didn't make anything. If you copy pieces from different compilers they won't work together. So I'm not sure how you "make" a compiler with copying and pasting from open source compiler. Are you saying you'll take one file from clang, one from gcc, another another from another compiler?
Sure. You can clone gcc and build it. You can close a game engine and use it.