[tialaramex]

> The idea that a compiler should just silently omit anything that it’s pretty sure won’t be needed is one of the most bafflingly daft decisions I’ve ever encountered.

It's not merely "pretty sure" - the language is specifically defined this way. C++ in particular requires as a minimum standard from practitioners a perfect knowledge of the vast, complex language standard. Anything less and you'll write a program which is ill-formed or has undefined behaviour, ie your program is nonsense.

[BHSPitMonkey]

I think the key word here is "silently"; It would be one thing if the compiler informed the developer it was going to skip a statement (and said "if you really want this statement kept in, add a preprocessor directive here")

[tialaramex]

Redundant NULL checks happen all over the place. So the result of your revised requirement would be a huge pile of useless diagnostics. Whereupon, as with similar diagnostics C++ programmers demand a way to switch them off because they're annoying, then they're back to being annoyed that the compiler didn't do what they expected.

[taneq]

Yeah, that's the problem.