You forgot to update the snippet but I get what you mean, but that's not the problem in the C code in TFA, the return is the last operation in the for loop (no

You forgot to update the snippet but I get what you mean, but that's not the problem in the C code in TFA, the return is the last operation in the for loop (no code after it). But you are correct that rust does emit a warning if you put the println! after the break while gcc 4.9.1 builds the following without any warning even with -Wextra: #include <stdio.h> int main() { int i; for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) { break; printf("unreached\n"); } return 0; } Which is pretty surprising to me, especially since the optimizer is clever enough to completely remove the for loop and the static string from the asm output, so unlike rust they actually know it's unused.