Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jhasse 3066 days ago
Well, most compiler bugs are cases where the compile "is wrong" and "being too limited for what I'm trying to do" also sounds like a bug. So this reads to me as "aside from when they are wrong, compilers are not wrong" ;)
1 comments

> Well, most compiler bugs are cases where the compile "is wrong"

Most compiler bugs are situations where the compiler allows stuff it should not or generates incorrect code.

> "being too limited for what I'm trying to do" also sounds like a bug. So this reads to me as "aside from when they are wrong, compilers are not wrong" ;)

Most every compiler is "too limited" to do some things, that is a big reason why dynamically typed languages are still a thing. For instance I can't tell Java to just take any object with an attribute "foo" despite it being the only thing I want to use (and I don't even care about its type) — bypassing the compiler via reflection aside. Do you think that's a bug in the compiler?

Hm ... I wouldn say thats a limitation of the compiler but of the language itself (no ducktyping). Definitely not a bug though.