[copsarebastards]

I understand the problem, I'm saying that it's not GCC's problem. If you don't want undefined behavior, don't put undefined behavior in your code. The code you wrote isn't clear or reasonable, because it relies undefined behavior. It's a valid criticism that this code does appear to be straightforward when it isn't, but that's not a criticism of GCC, it's a criticism of ANSI C. If you don't like it, use a better language. C was designed 4 decades ago; and they can't possibly have forseen every problem that we've discovered in that time.

[makomk]

ANSI C didn't really do anything wrong here, though - they created a least-common-denominator spec of what you could reasonably expect from C across all platforms. Pointer arithmetic on NULL pointers had to be considered undefined (not just unspecified) in ANSI C, because on certain commercially-important proprietary systems it generated a hardware trap that caused the OS to kill your process. The problem is that the gcc developers insisted on actually making that code behave as undefined even though it didn't make sense to.

Also, I should note that a lot of code - particularly the Linux kernel - isn't actually using ANSI C anyway. They're using a superset of it with gcc extensions and they have a whole bunch of architecture-specific code too.

[MaulingMonkey]

> If you don't want undefined behavior, don't put undefined behavior in your code.

I'd quip that this is statistically impossible for a sufficiently large codebase.

> it's a criticism of ANSI C. If you don't like it, use a better language.

This is my basic stance. However, if I'm e.g. in a situation where I have a C or C++ codebase I can't afford to rewrite from scratch, I'd like to use a "Better C" compiler, where "Better C" is a slightly less bad version of "ANSI C" - some undefined behavior removed, for example.

As shorthand, I'll generally refer to compilers for "Better C" as "Good C Compilers".

GCC is not trying to be a Good C Compiler. They've decided these things aren't their problem. Which is... fair. That's their choice. I do not for one minute pretend to understand that choice however - and it gives me yet one more reason to switch to a Good C Compiler.

[copsarebastards]

Good luck with that. I suspect the only good C is not C.

[MaulingMonkey]

I don't disagree - but there's value in harm reduction, no?