this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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Never seen a non-deterministic compiler though
C/C++ compilers are non deterministic due to support of super macros that change run to run, non-deterministic optimisation strategies or ordering due to parallelism, and linkers often produce different outputs every time they are run where subtle bugs can cause crashes when addresses don't line up how you expect. And that's without mentioning projects that use a configuration step.
It's actually a big problem in producing reproducible builds for security.
Can't most serious compilers produce reproducible builds these days given the same build environment. I know there has been a drive towards reproducible builds in general for security verification purposes.
Not by default usually but yes, you need to do a lot of work to set all necessary configurations and sometimes provide your own RNG seed for things which insist on random looking values.