about
Magellan: Autonomous Discovery of Compiler Optimization Heuristics w/AlphaEvolve (arxiv.org)
4 points by matt_d 246 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Magellan writes and evolves small C++ decision rules for compiler passes, testing each version on real programs and keeping the best. Its inlining rules beat decades of hand-tuned ones on both binary size and speed, and its register-allocation rule matched expert policies.

Abstract · Magellan: Autonomous Discovery of Novel Compiler Optimization Heuristics with AlphaEvolve

Modern compilers rely on hand-crafted heuristics to guide optimization passes. These human-designed rules often struggle to adapt to the complexity of modern software and hardware and lead to high maintenance burden. To address this challenge, we present Magellan, an agentic framework that evolves the compiler pass itself by synthesizing executable C++ decision logic. Magellan couples an LLM coding agent with evolutionary search and autotuning in a closed loop of generation, evaluation on user-provided macro-benchmarks, and refinement, producing compact heuristics that integrate directly into existing compilers. Across several production optimization tasks, Magellan discovers policies that match or 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. In register allocation, it learns a concise priority rule for live-range processing that matches intricate human-designed policies on a large-scale workload. We also report preliminary results on XLA problems, demonstrating portability beyond LLVM with reduced engineering effort.

Hongzheng Chen, Alexander Novikov, Ngân Vũ, Hanna Alam, Zhiru Zhang, Aiden Grossman, Mircea Trofin, Amir Yazdanbakhsh
arXiv:2601.21096 · cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.PL · submitted Jan 28, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to C4ML@CGO'26

add comment on HN