Re: Paper: Magellan: Autonomous Discovery of Novel Compiler Optimization Heuristics with AlphaEvolve

John,


A paper with "novel" in the title is a major red flag.


> This Google paper describes an AI approach to invent new compiler
> optimizations.


No they don't. They use an LLM to select the tuning parameters
for a well established optimization, function inlining.


> surpass expert baselines. In LLVM function inlining, Magellan synthesizes
> new heuristics that outperform decades of manual engineering for both
> binary-size reduction and end-to-end performance.


"... the continued Gemini-3-Pro run achieves consistent
positive speedups beyond 0%, ultimately surpassing the hand-
tuned baseline by 0.61%."


Figure 3/4 suggests a much bigger improvement, until the reader
realises that the comparison is not against human generated
rules. Results given to two decimal places and no error bars!


> In register allocation,
> it learns a concise priority rule for live-range processing that matches
> intricate human-designed policies on a large-scale workload.


This sentence in the abstract goes undiscussed in the paper, which
only looks at inlining.

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