CppCon 2019: Matt Godbolt “Compiler Explorer: Behind The Scenes”
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as the source on how Compiler Explorer began and for its lesser-known features like the machine code analyzer.
What it is
Matt Godbolt tells the story of Compiler Explorer, from a hacky basement server to a cloud-scaled service handling tens of thousands of daily requests. He also shows its features and how it is built.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2021 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends flohofwoe · 2021-03 · on “How to Read Assembly Language”
There's a few nice hidden features presented in Matt Godbolt's talk here: [this video] As for LLVM IR output, just use the right clang command line options: [LINK] Likewise for WASM: [LINK]
Recommends jiggawatts · 2021-07 · on “Apple and Intel first to use TSMC 3nm”
I recently watched the CppCon 2019 talk by Matt Godbolt "Compiler Explorer: Behind The Scenes"[1], and a cool feature he presented is the integrated LLVM Machine Code Analyser tool. If you look at the "timeline" and "resource" views of how a Zen 3 executes a typical assembly snippet, it is absolutely mind blowing. That beast of a CPU has so many resources it's just crazy. [1] [this video]
Cites pjmlp · 2021-07 · on “Strict memcpy() bounds checking for the Linux kernel”
Indeed, for Matt Godbolt, and the whole community that has added the remaining AOT languages, .NET is one of the few missing from Compiler Explorer, but it has a similar one at [LINK] and there is one at [LINK] for GPGPU shaders. Here is one talk from Matt Godbolt about how Compiler Explorer was born, CppCon 2019: Matt Godbolt “Compiler Explorer: Behind The Scenes” [this video]
Cites turtledragonfly · 2025-04 · on “Dirty tricks 6502 programmers use (2019)”
> But I wonder how common the knowledge is these days ... In one sense, it is less common, as you imply (though perhaps it's more that the number of high-level programmers have ballooned, rather than that the low-level ones have shrunk). In another sense, it's more accessible than ever, with tools like godbolt[1][2], VMs, cool profilers that show you a heatmap overlaid on assembly instructions, etc. And embedded development, where those details matter more, is still going strong, with IoT devices and so forth. [1] part of a presentation on it, if you're not already familiar: [this video] [2] the site itself: [LINK]