3 ms·
> to satisfy a minority use-case Every single C program is potentially in that "minority". Nobody can tell when the compiler writers are going to change up be
by rectang 5y ago
> to satisfy a minority use-case
Every single C program is potentially in that "minority". Nobody can tell when the compiler writers are going to change up behavior on you.
It doesn't matter how carefully the codebase has been written, whether you've had `-Wall -Wextra` enabled. What was fine at one time is no longer fine today. Any C program may suddenly start exhibiting misbehavior from innocuous to catastrophic to horrendously insecure.
It's psycho, maddening, irresponsible. And the only way to deal with it is to purge C programs compiled by these psychotic compilers from our systems.
- msbarnett 5y ago> Every single C program is potentially in that "minority". Nobody can tell when the compiler writers are going to change up behavior on you. This is ridiculously hyperbolic, and bringing unthinking emotional responses like "psycho" and "irresponsible" only obscures the fact that there are very serious engineering tradeoffs involved in trying to balance "not surprising people whose code contains an assumption that some case is going to behave a certain way when by-the-standard-as-written that case can be ignored" and "not making everything with a hot loop 8x slower because we can't assume anything about loop bounds any more", and that compilers that do the latter are unlikely to prove popular with a lot of people either.