alt Hacker News> But from my own experience, UB just means "consult your compiler to see what it does here because this question is beyond our pay grade."
People are taught it’s very bad because otherwise they do exactly this, which is the problem. What does your compiler do here may change from invocation to invocation, due to seemingly unrelated flags, small perturbations in unrelated code, or many other things. This approach encourages accepting UB in your program. Code that invokes UB is incorrect, full stop.
Replies
I understand, but you have to see how you would be considered one of the Standards-Purists that I was talking about, right? If Microsoft makes a guarantee in their documentation about some behavior of UB C code, and this guarantee is dated to about 14 years ago, and I see many credible people on the internet confirming that this behavior does happen and still happens, and these comments are scattered throughout those past 14 years, I think it's safe to say I can rely on that behavior, as long as I'm okay with a little vendor lock-in.
> Code that invokes UB is incorrect, full stop.
That's not true at all, who taught you that? Think of it like this, signed integer over/underflow is UB. All addition operations over ints are potentially invoking UB.
So this is incorrect code by that metric, that's clearly absurd.Compilers explicitly provide you the means to disable optimizations in a granular way over undefined behavior precisely because a lot of useful behavior is undefined, but compilation units are sometimes too complex to reason about how the compiler will mangle it. -fno-strict-aliasing doesn't suddenly make pointer aliasing defined behavior.
We have compiler behavior for incorrect code, and it's refusing to compile the code in the first place. Do you think it just a quirky oversight that UB triggers a warning at most? The entire point of compilers having free reign over UB was so they could implement platform-specific optimizations in its place. UB isn't arbitrary.