It needs to be something stronger than just deterministic.
With the right settings, a LLM is deterministic. But even then, small variations in input can cause very unforeseen changes in output, sometimes drastic, sometimes minor. Knowing that I'm likely misusing the vocabulary, I would go with saying that this counts as the output being chaotic so we need compilers to be non-chaotic (and deterministic, I think you might be able to have something that is non-deterministic and non-chaotic). I'm not sure that a non-chaotic LLM could ever exist.
(Thinking on it a bit more, there are some esoteric languages that might be chaotic, so this might be more difficult to pin down than I thought.)
Also, give the same programming task to 2 devs and you end up with 2 different solutions. Heck, have the same dev do the same thing twice and you will have 2 different ones.
Determinism seems like this big gotcha, but in it self, is it really?
> Heck, have the same dev do the same thing twice and you will have 2 different ones
"Do the same thing" I need to be pedantic here because if they do the same thing, the exact same solution will be produced.
The compiler needs to guarantee that across multiple systems. How would QA know they're testing the version that is staged to be pushed to prod if you can't guarantee it's the same ?
No we don't and we never should actually, compilers need to be deterministic.