Post #1677531

2026-04-24 15:56 UTC

what&#39;s the largest collection of compiler engineers who have ever worked at the same place, at the same time? I&#39;ve heard that IBM might have had hundreds at one point, and I&#39;ve heard that Nvidia might have over 1000 right now. anyone else have good data points here?

Replies (6)

@zwarich@hachyderm.io 2026-04-24 16:15

@regehr@mastodon.social Both Google and Meta have to be pretty good candidates along all of their projects (and the general mess that seems to be every MLIR-based compiler for AI).

Open ##2912068
@penguin42@mastodon.org.uk 2026-04-24 16:44

@regehr@mastodon.social It wouldn't surprise me if IBM had 100s of compiler engineers; but 'at the same place' might be pushing it; there would be the gcc/llvm people in the Linux side, some people in the Power side, of which some people would be in AIX, and probably some in iSeries, then there's the mainframe teams on their own OSs, and the Java people. There would be overlap in some places but not others, where people probably might even not know of each other.

Open ##2912070
@geofflangdale@mastodon.social 2026-04-25 06:34

@penguin42@mastodon.org.uk @pinskia@hachyderm.io @regehr@mastodon.social I've long wished that there was a sane and stable CS-focused broad-based research lab somewhere in Australia. NICTA turned into a "bonus system for existing players" (some quite good, but no-one had to quit their day job), CSIRO was a bullying factory with low pay, CiSRA was too weird (Silverbrook!), and most of the small corporate labs were "satisfy ausgov for X years".

Open ##2912073
@faux@tech.lgbt 2026-04-24 19:07

@regehr@mastodon.social there were a lot of people in one place at IBM working on the two java implementations, on adjacent floors, but not allowed to talk to each other. If you include stdlib authoring and porting as compiler engineering, then that would be a huge number. (I was merely interning.)

Open ##2912078
@TimWardCam@c.im 2026-04-25 13:12

@regehr@mastodon.social There were something like eight of us at HPAC.

Open ##2912081
@weirdsmiley@discuss.systems 2026-04-26 20:26

@regehr@mastodon.social I just saw this stat: https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/llvm-llvm-project/contributors?timeRange=past365days&start=2025-04-27&end=2026-04-27&widget=organizations-leaderboard Although this is specific to LLVM, but may give a rough picture. Creds: https://llvm.org/devmtg/2026-04/slides/keynote/keynote_kleckner.pdf

Open ##2912082