>With all due respect, these “adversial compiler” expression just makes zero sense, and takes a lot away from your comment. I was describing how it seems these

>With all due respect, these “adversial compiler” expression just makes zero sense, and takes a lot away from your comment. I was describing how it seems these complex compilers look for excuses to give you miscompilations, this "looking for gotcha's" makes the relationship appear adversarial to me. >Guess what, the world is complex, and software has no bound for complexity. My argument is that it really ought to. I think there is a diminishing return. >What if the former can create 2-10x faster code than the latter (I probably even underestimate it, loop unswitching, vectorization, etc. can account for even more differences). In code I've used with both compilers this has not been the case. Good profiling tools and manual hotspot optimization go a really long way. >It turns out that we can build abstractions on top of abstractions, and if it’s designed well, it will scale with complexity GCC has not scaled with complexity well enough, that's why we have people who lament its behavior. >Would you change back to an OS that didn’t handle multithreading as it’s too complicated? Concurrent programming makes problems easier, not harder in my experience. For what it's worth Plan 9 has excellent concurrent programming facilities. >Or that wouldn’t use GPUs? GPUs these days only work on systems in large part due to graces of the vendors themselves. Would nvidia or AMD be usable (enough) on Linux if there was not dedicated people from those companies working on drivers?