[jstimpfle]

I'm making the choice to pass pointers as void to get low-friction polymorphism. I'm making the choice to control the memory layout of my data structures, including of levels and type of indirection. I'm making the choice to control my own memory allocators and closely control lifetimes, closely control (almost) everything that happens in the system.

That has nothing to do with not following the standard.

[saagarjha]

But be as you may you’re not following the standard.

[jstimpfle]

what is your point?

[Xirdus]

If you don't follow the standard, gcc -O2 can introduce bugs to your code that you never even wrote. Skipping null checks, executing both branches of a conditional, and so on.

[jstimpfle]

Where did I say I'm not following the standard?

[Xirdus]

I interpreted these words:

> If you want to be standards correct, yes you have to know the standard well.

to mean that being standards-correct is optional. It's not. Every C programmer needs to know every possible UB by heart and never introduce any of it to their code, or else they'll be constantly introducing subtle, hard to debug bugs that contradict the actual code they wrote.

Maybe you meant something different by those words, but then I'm confused what the "if" was supposed to mean.

[jstimpfle]

Of course it's optional (although I didn't mean to imply that). Even using computers at all is optional. I never said that I don't aim to follow the standard, have a clean compiling program without warnings and without UB, etc. I do strive to achieve all of that.

But it's not entirely black and white, either. In practice I'm fine accepting that some bugs are technically UB but whatever, we've found a bug by whatever manifestation (like NULL dereference most likely leading to segfault in practice). I just fix the bug as a bug, and life goes on.

The standard is not perfect, it does have shortcomings. It can be improved. And it can be interpreted to fix some issues. Let's not hold theory over practicality, and let's expect the compiler writers also strive to do the reasonable thing.