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ueckeryesterday at 11:17 AM1 replyview on HN

Your problem is not the C committee but your lack of understanding how optimizing compilers work. WG14 could, of course, specify that a compiler has do exactly what you tell it to do. And in fact, every compiler supports this already: Im most cases even by default! Just do not turn on optimization. But this is not what most people want.

Once you accept that optimizing compilers do, well, optimizations, the question is what should be allowed and what not. Both inlining "memset" and eliminating dead stores are both simply optimizations which people generally want.

If you want a store not to be eliminated by a compiler, you can make it volatile. The C standard says this can not be deleted by optimizations. The criticism with this was that later undefined behavior could "undo" this by "travelling in time". We made it clear in ISO C23 that this not allowed (and I believe it never was) - against protests from some compiler folks. Compilers still do not fully conform to this, which shows the limited power WG14 has to change reality.


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raverbashingyesterday at 1:12 PM

Nope it is the C committee

> Once you accept that optimizing compilers do, well, optimizations

Why in tarnation it is optimizing out a write to a pointer out before a function that takes said pointer? Imagine it is any other function besides free, see how ridiculous that sounds?

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