> C can accommodate significant optimization while regaining semantic coherence – if only the standard and the compilers stop a lazy reliance on a mistaken read

> C can accommodate significant optimization while regaining semantic coherence – if only the standard and the compilers stop a lazy reliance on a mistaken reading of “impose no requirements”. That wouldn't be enough, because, sadly for us, rewriting history is only an option in Git repositories and speculative fiction. On this timeline, it doesn't much matter how the standard should have been interpreted (I'll refrain from opining on that), what matters is how the standard was interpreted, and its influence on the behavior of major compilers. Given the current situation, it seems to me that reaping the benefits of such an enterprise would require getting everyone on board, a mode that's based on the new interpretation, leaving it turned off by default, and then basically never actually using it for fear of breaking compatibility with toolchains that have to use an older version of the compiler for a good decade or two while we wait on them to age out of existence. I'm not sure the world actually has much practical use for an unapproachable ivory tower dialect of C. Personally, I'd much rather have a go at a language like Zig that's taken upon itself to dream even bigger.