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I was lucky enough to work with people working on CompCert in French public aerospace research labs. I remember a presentation in which they presented the numb
by crubier 5y ago
I was lucky enough to work with people working on CompCert in French public aerospace research labs.
I remember a presentation in which they presented the number of bugs they found on other compilers (GCC, Clang, MSVC) while developing test cases and benchmarks, and it was surprisingly high!
I don’t want to say any figures as I don’t remember it enough, but I think it was in the hundreds.
And there are many horror stories on Hacker News of people being impacted by compiler bugs in prod on non-critical software, sometimes with significant financial impact.
But yeah, not sure the price is worth it for non critical software in general.
- occamrazor 5y agoDid they fix or report the bugs upstream?
- archi42 5y agoThey're usually at least reported. At least that was the case for all the compiler-bug related papers I've read.
- crubier 5y agoYes I think they systematically reported it, and explained that their work was beneficial to all C compilers as a consequence. They did not fix them though, that would have needed a team 10x larger
- belter 5y agoDo you have a link to the presentation please ? All compilers have bugs, but I am interested in their comparison work in the context of CompCert