Determinism may be required for some compiler use cases, such as reproducible builds, and several replies have pointed that out. My point isn't that determinism is unimportant, but that it isn't intrinsic to compilation itself.

There are legitimate compiler use cases e.g. search‑based optimization, superoptimization, diversification etc where reproducibility is not the main constraint. It's worth leaving conceptual space for those use cases rather than treating deterministic output as a defining property of all compilers