[lyricaljoke]

> Be that as it may in most cases, the compiler shouldn't make an assumption that this is always the case. If I don't pass any optimization options, and especially if I pass -O0, the correct behavior should be "no surprises".

The problem with this argument is that before the compiler even enters the picture, the C standard has always specified that signed overflow is UB. I'd argue that providing the additional guarantee that "actually, it'd defined" for the -O0 case only is a bigger surprise than "funny stuff with your code." To categorize treating signed overflow as UB as doing "funny stuff" is off the mark; the behavior was always unspecified.

> I think you're underestimating the amount of people who will run "cc foo.c -o foo" and expect it to work, without thinking too much about UB as defined in the C standard, and who haven't ever heard of -fwrapv. By virtue of passing "-O1" in, it's safe for the compiler to assume you know what you're doing, but the default behavior should treat the user as a novice.

I can't remember the last time I actually invoked a C compiler directly on the command line in the way you're describing (rather than through higher-level build configuration; e.g. generated Makefiles, VS solutions, whatever). I would hope such a use case for non-toy code is... rare.