“It is never a compiler error”

Sadly, I've lost count of how many compiler bugs I've tripped over through the years. Often it's compiler crashes -- those are usually easy to get fixed, especially when (as tends to be the case with LLVM) they are caused by assertions failing -- but I've also tripped over compiler hangs (there's a variable in the tarsnap code with an utterly bogus volatile specifier in order to avoid the problematic optimization on some versions of llvm) and outright miscompilations --…

Embedded systems often have crappy compilers. And you sometimes have to pay crazy money to be abused, as well. Years ago, we were building an embedded vehicle tracker for commercial vehicles. The hardware used an ARM7 CPU, GPS, and GPRS modem, running uClinux. We ran into a tricky bug in the initial application startup process. The program that read from the GPS and sent location updates to the network was failing. When it did, the console stopped working, so we…