Written with LLM assistance.
The interview format is genuine; the prose is lightly tidied from voice notes.
I had lunch with a pal yesterday, and we got onto the subject of why so much technical material is either accurate-but-impenetrable or polished-but-slightly-wrong. It’s a gap I think about a lot, partly because I make videos that try to land in the middle of it and don’t always succeed. The conversation stuck with me on the drive home.
This morning, whilst walking the dog, I tried something a bit silly: I asked Claude (dictating to the mobile app1) to interview me about it. Voice-to-text on one end, an LLM playing journalist on the other, and a black lab setting the pace. What follows is that conversation, lightly tidied – paraphrased in places, verbatim in others. The LLM is the interviewer; I’m the subject.
Written with LLM assistance.
Details at end.
I’ve been meaning to write about something that’s become a regular part of my life over the past year and a bit: my Computerphile videos. If you’ve ever wondered what really happens inside your computer at the lowest level1, this series is for you.
The series covers the fundamentals of CPU operation: machine code, maths, pipelining, branch prediction, out of order execution, register renaming, interrupts, supervisor/kernel mode, and how MMUs work. This morning I recorded an episode (not yet released) that puts it all together, showing how these features combine in an operating system to enable pre-emptive multitasking.
It’s been over a year since I updated my blog; and I’ve been making some pretty fundamental changes to the infrastructure I host it all on. So this is more of a test post than a hugely informative one.
That said; the reason I’be been making those changes is because, a couple of weeks ago I formed “Compiler Explorer LLC” as an Illinois-based corporation.
Does this mean Compiler Explorer is going to be a business now?!
Today is Compiler Explorer’s 10th Birthday:
commit 15ea5e164b55c2b5ee0d3b432e3984b8f361afd2
Author: Matt Godbolt <matt@godbolt.org>
Date: Tue May 22 21:07:40 2012 -0500
Initial import of GCC-Explorer
Ten years ago I got permission to open source a little tool called GCC Explorer. I’d developed it over a week or so of spare time at my then-employer DRW in node.js, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Like so many, I started a podcast – Two’s Complement – during the pandemic, with my good friend and colleague Ben Rady.
Some folks asked how we made it sound so “professional”, and so I’m sharing here how we do it.
Most importantly: get everyone to record their audio locally. Audacity is free and works perfectly for this. Make sure you test that you can’t hear each other’s sound in the mix. Start recording, make sure the right microphone is in use by tapping it and observing the wiggly lines and then get others to make noise and ensure you hear them but don’t see the wiggly lines on your side.
Matt Godbolt is a C++ developer living in Chicago. He works for Hudson River Trading on super fun but secret things. He is one half of the Two's Complement podcast. Follow him on Mastodon or Bluesky.