I used the Nano pass framework for my language when I was in grad school and loved it. I forget the exact count but I think we had 40 or 50 passes. Generally each pass either did some analysis that would be consumed by a later pass or it rewrote some higher level concept or feature in terms of more primitive operations.
Nanopass had a DSL for describing what forms you delete from each intermediate language and which forms you add. Each pass was generally pretty small then, usually just replacing one form with some set of other forms.
Be cause each pass was really small it was pretty easy to reorder them. Sometimes we figured out if we moved one optimization sooner then later passes worked better. Or we realized some analysis was useful somewhere else so we rearranged the passes again. The pass ordering made it really clear which analysis results are valid at each point in the compilation process.
You know, that's exactly how I learned to program.
I started up QBasic knowing nothing other than that it seemed like a thing for programming computers and programming seemed like a cool thing to do.
I typed in random words, and eventually I typed "screen". When I pushed enter, QBasic capitalized it, so it seemed important. I hit F1 and read the help. It made no sense, but the example ran and had other capitalized words so I could repeat the process.
Eventually I started making really terrible text-based Final Fantasy knock-offs.
When we were teenagers, one of my friends lit a guitar pick on fire. It was a lot more exciting than we expected! We thought it'd just shrivel up and melt, but instead it was like the pick was made of solid rocket fuel.
For what it's worth, I've read both Bostrom's Superintelligence and AI 2027. Reading Superintelligence was interesting and for me really drove home how hard setting aligned goals for an AI is, but the timelines seemed far enough out that it wasn't likely to be something that would matter in my lifetime.
AI 2027 was much more impactful on me. It probably helps that I read it the same week I started playing with agent mode on GitHub Copilot. Seeing what AI can already do, especially compared to six months ago, and then seeing their projections made AI seem like something much more worth paying attention to.
Yeah, getting from here to being killed by rogue AI nanobots in less than five years still seems pretty far fetched to me. But, each of the steps in their scenario didn't seem completely outside the realm of possiblity.
So for me personally, my 80% confidence interval includes both things stagnating pretty much where they are now, but also something more like AI 2027. I suspect we'll be fine, but AGI seems like a real enough possibility that it's worth working on a contingency plan.
This was back when Internet Explorer was at version 7. Some Mozilla folks told me they used to get questions like "when are you going to upgrade to Internet 7 like Microsoft?"
If I remember right, after Firefox 4 they skipped a few versions and started the train model, while also trying to de-emphasize the version number in marketing.
Nanopass had a DSL for describing what forms you delete from each intermediate language and which forms you add. Each pass was generally pretty small then, usually just replacing one form with some set of other forms.
Be cause each pass was really small it was pretty easy to reorder them. Sometimes we figured out if we moved one optimization sooner then later passes worked better. Or we realized some analysis was useful somewhere else so we rearranged the passes again. The pass ordering made it really clear which analysis results are valid at each point in the compilation process.