hckrnws

I bet claude was hyping this guy up as he was building it. "Absolutely, a rust compiler written in PHP is a great idea!"

This is a great example of how people waste our planet's resources faster with AI.

Seriously, in what world do we need a rust compiler in php? I'd rather have cheap RAM and storage, which I can't because of this kind of stupid idea.

I wonder how much energy was wasted on this. How many people got poisoned or killed in mines to create the GPUs that spewed out this useless code.

The fact that we can do something doesn't mean we should. It's time to end this madness.

EDIT: yeah keep your downvotes coming. Ignore the obvious problem. Easy, it's invisible, just don't think about it.

Why do we assume this was created with AI? Is there some marker we can use to detect that?

The amount of code committed per day suggest some kind of automation.

Also, a passionate programmer usually will add a "why this exists" in his readme.

I'd be very surprised if this wasn't AI.

Why are you assuming this was AI? It doesn't show any obvious indications of being AI. Maybe this is just someone's random side project. I advise you against jumping to conclusions.

Just look at the commit cadance, the bulk of the 8k lines of code was added in a couple of hours. Most commits 2-4 minutes apart. This is 100% vibe coded and it's pretty obvious.

> It doesn't show any obvious indications of being AI.

I agree that he probably asked the AI to omit some common AI tells, like excessive comments, verbose readmes etc.

People are weird, I for one started to use em dash more often — look at me!

Prove me wrong :)

you never know what’s going on in someone else’s claude max plan

You never know what’s going on in someone else’s Claude Max plan =D

Interesting that both you and nxtfari made essentially the same comment within an hour of each other, though yours is slightly modified

Yeah, right? Are we just... talking with bots?

Are all PHP developers named Rasmus?

I also for a second thought this was Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP. In my head I just have him as Rasmus L-something, so this guy was just a hash collision. :)

I wonder if the compiler runs on https://github.com/VKCOM/kphp (a PHP->C++ transpiler)

Sometimes when doing offensive security work you end up in the strangest environments with limited tools, odd quirks, broken shells, and god knows what else. But you know what is almost always available and just works? PHP.

Nop. awk, bash or some POSIX shell certainly. Perl most likely, despite it’s plunge in popularity. On a modern Mac, awk, bash and Perl are preinstalled with the system. PHP is not even necessarily present at system level on a PHP dev box as it might be only installed in some container.

interesting proof of concept, in php, who would have thought :D

I think that proof of concepts are PHP’s greatest strength, actually.

These days it can be almost as strict as you want it to be, but it’s always been a “loose” enough language that you can implement things that work in very fragile ways and iterate at incredible speed.

When I am designing PoC microservices that will eventually end up running as Go or Rust, I often start with a prototype in PHP.

[dead]