Intrinsics which do the right thing seems like so obviously the correct answer to me that I've always been confused about why the discussion is always about dis

Intrinsics which do the right thing seems like so obviously the correct answer to me that I've always been confused about why the discussion is always about disabling optimizations. Even in the absence of compiler optimizations (which is not even an entirely meaningful concept), writing C code which you hope the compiler will decide to translate into the exact assembly you had in mind is just a very brittle way to write software. If you need the program to have very specific behavior which the language doesn't give you the tools to express, you should be asking for those tools to be added to the language, not complaining about how your attempts at tricking the compiler into the thing you want keep breaking.