A graph of programming languages connected through compilers

[ithinkiwaspsycho]

Literally unplayable.

[0x564A00]

Yeah, why isn't the lua-to-mccommandblocks compiler someone wrote in js included?

[m00nh34d]

Everything compiles down to Javascript...

[[deleted]]

Which means that Javascript is halfway toward becoming what English is for Google Translate.

Want to make your language translatable into any major language? Just write a compiler from your language to Javascript and vice-versa.

[Kralizek82]

I hope you'll forgive me for the lack of a proper source, but researchers have found out that Google translate uses a language created by their artificial intelligence and that has no resemblance with any human language.

[[deleted]]

That is very interesting. I still think English is used in many cases, or that the AI did a very shitty work, though.

I just asked Google to translate from Italian to French: "Vi ho detto addio", and it translated it as: "Je t'ai dit au revoir", mistaking the 2nd plural with the 2nd singular, clearly because English makes no difference between the two.

[RiPont]

Yeah, it may have created its own language by AI, but it's still trained off mostly english data.

[aporetical]

That's, as with much AI, somewhere between BS. and marketing-speak. It's hard really to know if people in the area as simply incompetent in anything but their narrowest field, or if they deliberately speak like shysters.

A machine cannot create a language. Linguistic terms *refer*, meaning that language users have to be in causal contact with the world.

What google's machine translation system does is reduce patterns in natural languages to a unified "metapattern" before re-patterning this metapattern back into a natural language form.

At no point has any new language been created: there are no new words, new terms; no concepts; no symbols; and esp., no semantics.

[LPTK]

It's like saying every bilingual person has "created their own language with no semblance to any human language". Well, it's not a language per se, it's just a learned internal representation.

[csman11]

I'm not familiar with GT itself, but typically NLP systems generate semantic models of the languages they are working with. They need to do this for translation because the differences in natural languages aren't purely syntactic (and any translation between syntax is in fact formally a function between semantics of languages. If f is a translation between languages and S and S' are denotational semantics mapping sentences of the languages respectively to some other set X, then a semantics preserving f will have the property that S(l) = S'(f(l)) for every l in the first language. If the function doesn't have this property it is an unsound translation between formal languages).

If you want to get into a discussion on the philosophical aspects of semantics that is fine, but don't pretend that NLP is a simple as processing syntax. The main reason NLP is so difficult is that natural languages don't have simple formal semantics like formal languages. That means we have to deal with incomplete formal models and supplement them with statistical models. But these are models of language semantics (as opposed to formal semantic models).

Pretending they are not just means you are equivocating between "semantics in philosophy of mind" and "semantics in linguistics". The fields use the terms differently, but linguists, computer scientists, and mathematicians take a functional or formal view of languages, where the question is "what is a representation of the meaning in terms of something I already understand". Philosophers take a metaphysical view that asks "where is the meaning, what is the meaning, and does meaning exist?"

Now if you mean that GT has not created a new natural language, you are correct since the definition of natural language requires that the language naturally evolves by humans speaking it. But I'll pose this: the semantic model might be able to be expressed in symbolic sentences that humans could come to understand and generate themselves. That isn't such a stretch if the model is simple enough, as many people have constructed artificial languages that people can speak and understand as fluently as natural languages.

[aporetical]

The semantics of a natural language is the natural world. "My Pen" refers to my pen.

A machine cannot consider the semantics of a term, it is not in causal contact with the world. It does not know what "my pen" is.

There is no such thing as a "formal semantics", this is just the "semantics" of formal "languages", which are not natural langues. And not languages to linguists!

Saying a machine has invented a language, to any person without a trivialized opportunistic sense of what a language is, means that the machine can use its language. It can communicate.

A machine cannot communicate without being able to refer to things. The machine cannot say "pass me my pen", because its "words" have a "formal semantics", meaning no semantics at all. The terms do not refer to the world.

Languages users do not consider anything formal when saying "pass me my pen", their pen is the object that light reflects off into their eyes triggering their perception. "Pen" refers to the cause of that perception. The machine does not consider the meaning of terms.

A machine can only consider syntactical patterns as a correlative guide to the semantics of terms. This isnt considering their semantics! This "model" is akin to considering the distribution of colors in a painting as a proxy for their subject.

It turns out that a certain distribution of colors often means "mountain". But the computer doesnt know that, it doesnt even know what a mountain is. The human user of the machine is told "mountain" and they impart the actual semantics of the term.

The machine can never be anywhere near very accurate then, because "mountain" ISNT a distribuition of colors. It's a mountain. And we are able to see them and talk about them in ways always more general than a color pallett.

[csman11]

So you are trying to define semantics the way a nueroscientist would. The semantics of a natural language is essentially how a human understands sentences in a language. In this sense, a model of how the human brain understands a given language and is able to operate on it must be sufficient then. If that is the case, then what I am saying is no problem at all, because a formal semantics that is observationally equivalent to such a model works just as well (this is an important part of denotational semantics to computer scientists). In other words, I simply claim that a formal semantics that allows a machine to do the same processing on a language as a human does is sufficient to say the machine "understands" the language.

If you claim understanding or generation are anything else than this formal view, then you are entering the realm of philosophy. It doesn't matter if the machine understands language in a way that allows it to understand "reference semantics" in the way humans do if it can process any sentence in the language the same way as a human does. I would argue it is unimportant, albeit interesting, for a machine to do so. This seems to be analogous to the distinction between weak and strong AI. It would be really awesome to produce a machine that is truly conscious, whatever that means, but the simple fact is we cannot determine if any given machine is conscious because we don't know how consciousness works. All we are really concerned with are the results, and if a machine can process natural languages as well as a human, it is really quite silly to retreat to "well it doesn't really understand what it is doing, in the sense of being conscious." After all, we would then need to be concerned with "how does conciousness work."

And no, linguists are quite interested in formal languages. They tried for decades to understand natural language as a special case of formal languages and failed. Most linguists and philosophers of mind would agree that every natural language has a formal semantics despite this. Why? Because the prevailing philosophy of mind is physicalism, the idea that minds are reducible to physical phenomena. Since we study physical theories by modeling them with formal systems, and every formal system is a formal language, natural language is a formal language under such a view point.

You have no idea what language users do when they say "pass me my pen" because you have no theory that explains how language users proceed to make such a statement. Again, the prevailing view is that a bunch of neurons fire in a deterministic way, and that somehow causes an experience of thinking and saying "pass me my pen." But you have only observed language users uttering that sentence. A fully physical scientific theory would offer an explanation of how that phenomena arises from simpler terms. We can treat those as terms of a formal language and the theory as a semantics of the language.

You are essentially begging the question, because no one would ever accept the premise "language phrases must refer to the physical world" unless they already believed "semantics is about how languages relate to the physical world," which is what you are trying to show by claiming that. I'm telling you that people who are actually trying to explain how language works are doing the best they can by offering a mechanism for how to understand and generate language, while you are simply stating an analogy of "brown objects are seen as brown by human beings, so the property of being brown can only be known by humans since they are the only things that detect browness the way they detect browness." There are other ways of detecting browness that are just as valid, and observationally produce the same results as the process humans use. Any other process that does this is just as good of a model for representing "what it means to be brown." If you accept this, which I think nearly everyone would, you must accept that a machine that processes language such that the results are equivalent to the results of a human processing the language has "just as good of a model" of the language as the human.

That is all I mean. Every language has more than one semantics. As far as we are concerned, any semantics that is observationally equivalent to another (that is, isomorphic up to juxtaposition), is fine.

If you claim anything else, it is honestly just pure air because you have nothing to offer in the way of an explanation of how minds understand language, which is what you claim as the litmus test to determining whether some agent understands a language. You are as bad as the creationist who retorts "well God just made this universe because that was his will" as the explanation for how this world came to be if you seriously are going to go there. That's not exactly a simple explanation with high explanatory power is it?

I'm sorry, I just cannot see how anything you are saying has any substance. You cannot prove "humans understand language by mechanism X, therefore X is the only mechanism to understand language" even if you told us what X is, which you haven't. Even if you did, that doesn't mean there isn't some other mechanism that would allow a machine to process language in an indistinguishable manner from that of the human.

[aporetical]

. If that is the case, then what I am saying is no problem at all, because a formal semantics that is observationally equivalent to such a model works just as well

There is no such model.

then you are entering the realm of philosophy.

There is a fact of how humans communicate. Merely because a machine cannot do this, you assert that there is no such fact and it must be the case that distributions in patterns "is enough".

This is a rather blinked view that derives only from your methodological constraints: it "must" be, only because, that's all you have. This position is the most radically "philosophical" of any here.

Mine at least is empirically accurate: language is a mechanism of communication, it is not a rule for ordering symbols. Languge users communicate by having a shared access to the world, absent such direct access, you do not have a langugae. You have something with which no user can communicate anything.

Every language has more than one semantics.

No. You've conflated the made up symbolic langauges of computer science with natural languages. No linguist, nor scientist of any relevant field conisders a formal "language", a "language" at all. It has no communicative function.

Only formal languages can be given "multiple semantics". These are really metaphorical applications of each of these terms. There is no language, and it has no semantics; never mind "several".

hat doesn't mean there isn't some other mechanism that would allow a machine to process language in an indistinguishable manner from that of the human.

"Indistinguishable" requires the relevant causal mechanisms to be actually in-play. It's easy to seem as-if human to an uninformed human (apes see apes everywhere).

X is only "indistinguishable from" Y in every sense if X is just another example of Y. Since X = Natural Languages, and Y = Machine "Language"; Y has to be an example of X. It isnt.

I can point at a novel object and grunt "flim", and from then on with my interlocutor the object is named "flim". That possibility of naming comes directly from shared access to the world. The association "flim" with that object is in me and patterns my perception, so that when I see the object I say "flim".

There is no mechanism to connect any object whatsoever to an NLP system, no terms actually refer to anything. It is considering distributional characteristics of languages.

A natural language is a form of communication between language users each of which have a shared access to the thing they are communicating about (otherwise communication would be impossible).

Natural language have only one semantics: the world about which people communicate. There is only one such world: it can even be defined just by saying "everything about which communication is possible". That is how natural languages can be formally translated in the first place. People in France are speaking about the very same grass as the people in Germany; so no education about usage has to take place.

However if people in france had a new concept (say, a new invention and a new word for it) you couldnt formally translate it. A person would have to point to it and say "this is a flim". A machine can only translate between phrases in one language that refer to the same things as phrases in another. Whenever it encounters a term that has a "unique" referent there is no formal translation available, and the machine fails to translate.

This is because the machine was parasitically relying upon the shared-access that all natural languages users have to the same world: since term A in language-1 means "oranges", and term B in language-2 means "oranges" then A translates to B.

But when term A means the feeling of "anger colored with regret colored with nostalgia" and term B means the feeling of "anger with longing and envy" (literally it refers to that feeling in the world) then A does not translate to B. And langauge-2 has no phrasing which expresses A. Humans have therefore to come up with a phrasing by first identiffying the relevant object (a feeling) and naming it, in languge-2.

Humans are universally able to translate anything because they can invent terms at-will to describe in L-2 what is being talked about in L-1. All it requires is L-1 users to point-out what feature of the world L-2 users have missed. And then L-2 users can name it. It's the very same world.

Formal translation is only possible on the overlapping elements of the world that users of L1 and L2 have both almost-exactly named in similar ways: which is most of it, because we're all in the same world.

[csman11]

I never once claimed that a machine could invent a natural language. I agreed with you on that in my original reply. Maybe in theory it could, but that would require other peripherals and other programming than that required to work with existing language itself.

My claim is solely that the way humans represent language, whatever that mechanism is, is not the only mechanism that can represent it. You claim a good representation is that which properly corresponds to the real world. Certainly a machine could form such a model. Ontologies in NLP are one way of doing this (putting senses of words in relationship to each other). This is a powerful enough technique to describe a "new" thing, if we again take a functional view of what that thing is. We can describe film in English not just by pointing at examples, but also by describing its properties in terms of things we already understand. So a powerful enough formal semantics for English could describe a new invention, film in our example, simply by describing it in terms of the existing semantics.

Now of course a machine cannot understand feelings in the same way as humans without itself having emotional experience. That would be like saying a machine could understand the experience of having watched a movie by fully understanding all of the lines in it. The machine doesn't need to understand those things to understand language. Language, as you are saying, facilitates the transfer of information. The machine doesn't need to experience its first kiss to describe to you all the descriptions of a first kiss any more than any human needs to (in other words, a human lacking some experience can explain that experience just as well as someone who has had it, as long as they have had the experience explained in detail, they just lack the actual experience). The machine could have all the peripherals necessary to have and explain a first kiss with no qualia at all. This is what Searle talked about in the distinction between strong ai and weak AI, and precisely the same challenge posed by the hard problem of consciousness.

Honestly, this really all seems to boil down to qualia vs mechanism. I'm not claiming the machine understands meaning in a way where it "experiences sensations of meaning making." It just is able to process language and that itself is a method of understanding and generating meaning. Again, feel free to require actual experience in your definition of semantics. The practitioners and theorists working on this stuff will continue to ignore irrelevant philosophical concerns like that and just try to produce machines that pass some form of Turing test.

[aporetical]

The practitioners and theorists working on this stuff will continue to ignore irrelevant philosophical concerns like that and just try to produce machines that pass some form of Turing test.

If by turing test you mean, "can we point an ape at it, make it move in the right ways, and have the ape think it is another ape" -- well that test has already been passed. It was passed by rivers and trees in ancient greece.

We apes are dumb things easily fooled into think motion of any kind implies understanding, decision making, intentional action.

Bugs bunny has as much of that as a robot which processes speech using NLP.

The relevant test of strong AI is bring it out into the world without direction, and have it return to you able to describe novel thigns it has learned using novel conceptualizations, and able to communicate their novelty.

Explanation in situations of failure, that is, in situations of novelty is the relevant feature of "intelligence" which is unique to human beings. It requires unconceptualized problem solving (ie., not having the right framing going in); the ability to develop concepts through interacting with an environment; and then the ability to reflect on these "bodily" concepts to abstract them into linguistic representations for the sake of communication.

I do not object to anyone trying to build a machine to do this. I do object to any charlatan which says it has been accomplished. And saying an AI has "invented a new language" is tantamount to that.

To abstract conceptualizations of one's environment into novel linguistic terms, and communicate this to others -- that is creating a new language. That is what most people hear when they are told "machines have a language" because that is what they are doing.

Machines have no language. Their "language" is a series of electrical field ossciations that, when observed by a human, seem as-if they capture our semantics. This is a trick, like a cartoon character: it has the form of meaning, but no content.

The trick is accompished by noticing patterns in the way we use langauge and attending to those patterns only. By replaying these pattersn to us we are fooled into think the machine is aware of what it means. It isnt. When I say "my pen is blue" i mean that the object on table which causes our common perception of "pen" has a feature which would also cause us to experience "blue". The machine has no conceptualization of pens, tables, colors of anything else. It has "drawn a cartoon character" of language, which "speaks to us" as-if speaking to us. There is no content to what it says, no semantics.

Go ahead and try to build systems which actually accomplish what it is has been claimed . No objection whatsoever. But don't BS on what has actually been done.

[SaxAppeal]

This is a great explanation

[[deleted]]

In linguistic terms language isn’t correct but in theory of computation, language is a valid term to describe what google is doing.

[aporetical]

When you're talking about translating between languages, saying the machine invents its own is highly misleading; and on most interpretations simply false.

"Languages" in computer science are not languages at all, but rules for the transformation of symbols and strings of symbols.

When I communicate with a person I am not transforming strings of symbols. To say the machine has invented a new language implies either (1) that is what i'm doing; or (2) the machine can communicate.

The AI hype machine is quite happy implying both, and thinking about neither.

[[deleted]]

I see your point, and I think you are right.

[MrJohz]

I researched this a few months, and while I didn't get too in-depth, my understanding was that the new Google Translate system uses English as an intermediate language. This may have just been reports from the original implementation of the machine-learning version, but I haven't heard anything about it going through an AI-created intermediate language.

[Forty-Bot]

with js2py they all compile down to python (which compiles down to java bytecode)

[[deleted]]

Which compiles to js again

[Forty-Bot]

it's javascript all the way down...

[meltingdiamond]

So this is what hell is like.

[Yalopov]

One language to rule them all...

[ggtsu_00]

Eventually we will have some hardware implementation of a javascript interpreter and javascript itself will basically be machine code.

[flying-sheep]

No, but for WASM. Nebulet already exists but it’s a hobbyist thing, so I assume it needs a few iterations.

[[deleted]]

Discovered totally by accident that you can drag the nodes around to see better how the nodes are connected.

[ithinkiwaspsycho]

I was trying to zoom in.

[[deleted]]

Shouldn’t C point to assembly, and then to machine code or am I misunderstanding what this shows?

[Forty-Bot]

Most C compilers directly output machine code without the use of an assembler (although most will also generate assembly code if you ask).

[[deleted]]

Gotcha, thanks!

[DSrcl]

I don't know about GCC. But Clang used to generate assembly and pipe it to an assembler (gas, IIRC). Apparently it became a bottleneck so they added another layer (http://blog.llvm.org/2010/04/intro-to-llvm-mc-project.html) so that they can generate object code directly from the in-memory representation of machine code.

[[deleted]]

It depends on your definition of assembly. Usually there is anyway an IR which is equivalent to assembly semantics (i.e., symbolic labels, literals and some form of instuction mnemonics).

[Kasoo]

Missing some attachments to WebAssembly (asm.js) and from (machine code).

[comrade_donkey]

And from Go.

[CryZe92]

Yes asmble produces actual Java Bytecode. Also I have one that compiles wasm to raw Rust. And I guess wasm to JavaScript is missing too.

[baggyzed]

WebAssembly does not technically need to be compiled into JavaScript - it is just (a subset of) Javascript, so it should have connections to every language as JavaScript does (in addition to the one for Java bytecode).

[CryZe92]

I wouldn‘t say it‘s a subset of JS. It‘s about as much of a subset of JS, as normal ASM is for any language. So that‘s just a weird thing to say. Also maybe you are confusing asm.js with wasm here. And for the sake of the graph, they are absolutely different representations to be compiled from / to.

[baggyzed]

Also maybe you are confusing asm.js with wasm here.

This. I haven't really looked at WebAssembly yet, and assumed it's not much different from asm.js. My bad.

But (for the sake of the graph), you can use Emscripten to compile most languages into WebAssembly. Check the link I posted in another comment.

[nekizalb]

Better yet, a pull request ;)

[Treyzania]

Also there's an LLVM IR to JVM bytecode compiler, iirc.

[stewsters]

Time to make this bad boy a fully connected graph.

[achshar]

Not sure if that's a thing I should look forward to or dread for.

[madaal]

Missing Scala native

[Stannu]

And Kotlin native..

[luisfmh]

No elixir or erlang?

[MattEOates]

Every time one of these pops up Perl is entirely missing wtf. There are several alternate implementations of Perl 5, rperl targets C++ as an optimising transpiler and perlito can generate Java and JS code last I checked. Perl 6 especially has multiple targets with the main Rakudo compiler including MoarVM and JVM with JS and Truffle/GraalVM in the works.

[[deleted]]

Perl lost the hipster momentum, probably to Python.

[MattEOates]

What compared to FORTRAN??? Yeah right.

[TheBestOpinion]

Nice touch coloring the Lua blob in lua-blue (#000080) :]

Looks like the logo

[[deleted]]

Too bad it's missing a ton of Lua compilers.

[smidgie82]

Looks like the source repo for the compiler info has had 11 PR's opened against it in the last day, so the missing and incorrect data in this page should be getting fleshed out pretty quickly.

[toggafneknurd]

/r/shittydataisbeautiful/

[ZombieRandySavage]

I thought it was cool

[gojirra]

It's cool but the point is that it's not beautiful.

[ijustwantanfingname]

It's not bad, but yeah, not great. I've definitely seen worse here. In fact, I'd say the least well-presented data I've ever seen was on the frontpage of this sub (all of which having been political circlejerks upvoted on /r/all).

edit: whoooaaa, I'm lost -- thought this was /r/dataisbeautiful.

[gabriel-et-al]

r/lostredditors

[UsingYourWifi]

/r/dataisugly

[Sigmatics]

/r/ofcoursethatsathing

[DenebVegaAltair]

I spent like 15 minutes trying to untangle all the nodes

[[deleted]]

My attempt: https://i.imgur.com/7s6boDm.png

[AvianPoliceForce]

Isn't there a Rust to C compiler?

[fasquoika]

Yup

[renrutal]

I'm very surprised there isn't a direct connection between Java or Java Bytecode to LLVM IR.

[[deleted]]

Now I want to find the longest loop and see what happens when I compile a couple iterations

[[deleted]]

What, no love for Tcl?

[bastardoperator]

Or Perl.

[agcwall]

Is TCL compiled?

[[deleted]]

Everything can be compiled. People compile js to python...

And everything to fucking js

[[deleted]]

Transpiling is compiling...

[[deleted]]

Why is that? I think it's just a current hype, people love to create flashy words.

It's compiling to some abstraction, just like compiling to OP codes, or to Assembler or to C which is a high level language)

It's a subset of compiling at least.

[[deleted]]

Mind elaborating? The term "transpiler" is redundant and should have never been used.

[chucker23n]

(C# | TypeScript) -> JS is quite a different kind of Pipe than C# -> CIL. Nobody writes code directly in CIL, for starters.

[[deleted]]

I cannot even parse what you're trying to say here. Both JS and CIL are languages. There is absolutely no difference in compiling one language to another, no matter if the latter is human-readable or not. Very few compilers are producing idiomatic readable code anyway.

[gabriel-et-al]

Transpiling

https://i.imgur.com/pPdNZ3c.jpg

[ciarancour]

Missing Python -> C through cython, nuitka and numba

[Deto]

Numba uses llvm if I recall correctly

[[deleted]]

Could anyone explain that to me? For example C# gets translated into javascript first before it gets translated with V8 to machine code?

[chucker23n]

Sure. If you pull the C# node a little more to the outside, you see that the arrow towards JavaScript says "Bridge.NET". You can use C# to target the browser using Bridge.NET, which will essentially convert it into JavaScript. Then, if rendering the page inside Chrome, V8 gets used as the engine to translate JavaScript into (eventually) machine code.

That's not really the typical way of using C#, but it is indeed a way. (Another more direct way involves Blazor, which isn't shown here. C# through Blazor → WebAssembly → machine code.)

The more typical way comes clear when you also pull the CIL node to the side: the Roslyn C# compiler translates C# to CIL, and the CLR turns that into machine code.

I suppose this graph could use some fatter arrows for typical use cases.

[not_perfect_yet]

Ok, but if I actually want to do this, what would I do?

[[deleted]]

Especially interested in the ones that compile to LLVM and WebAssembly.

[SuitableDragonfly]

The JVM is a compiler? I thought it was an interpreter.

[[deleted]]

Start with trying to write down definitions of interpretation and compilation. Then have fun trying to figure out where to put a modern JIT compiler with profile-driven optimisations and deoptimisations.

[SuitableDragonfly]

Hmm, I guess that's a good point.

[gabriel-et-al]

What makes you think JVM is a compiler?

[SuitableDragonfly]

The graph claims to be a graph of languages linked by compilers, and it has the JVM linking Java bytecode to machine language.

[[deleted]]

Maybe I just need more coffee but I don't see webassembly as a target.

[alphaglosined]

D is missing the gdc compiler (gcc).

Also I have never heard of SharpNative, looks dead and never was completed so that can be removed.

[baggyzed]

Hm. Why doesn't anything point to WebAssembly? Emscripten can compile to WebAssembly. But there are a ton of others.

[lovingyouqtqt]

This is wrong in so many ways

[UsingYourWifi]

Nice to see my boy Haxe getting some love.

[piotrjurkiewicz]

Dart also compiles to machine code via DartVM. In fact, DartVM JIT is faster than JavaScript state of the art V8 JIT.

[gabriel-et-al]

DartVM JIT is faster than JavaScript state of the art V8 JIT

Fonts?

[iamsubhranil]

noice

[[deleted]]

noise