There's 830 open and confirmed wrong-code bugs in GCC at the time of writing. Compiler bugs aren't as rare as people think: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist

There's 830 open and confirmed wrong-code bugs in GCC at the time of writing. Compiler bugs aren't as rare as people think: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=SUSPENDED&bug_status=WAITING&bug_status=REOPENED&cf_known_to_fail_type=allwords&cf_known_to_work_type=allwords&f1=keywords&o1=substring&query_format=advanced&v1=wrong-code https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_... I think it's just common for people to assume they're wrong and change things blindly rather than carefully checking the standard for their language (assuming their language even has a standard to check). It doesn't help that before AddressSanitizer and co. existed compilers would just do all sorts of nonsense when they detected possibly undefined code in C and C++.