What every compiler writer should know about programmers [pdf]

One of the things this person misses is a lot of these are undefined with the explicit goal to let compiler authors take advantage of them. So his real argument is with the C committee for not defining these things the way he wants them. His claim that the behavior of what should happen is obvious is pretty strange (IE "it should do exactly whatever the compiler is trying to prove it doesn't") It's essentially a complaint that compiler authors…

The author seems to be saying, in section 4, that compilers should just stop doing some optimizations (such as converting int to size_t where appropriate) and should expect programmers to do those optimizations instead, in order to reduce undefined behavior. The problem with this argument is that it doesn't match economic reality. Compiler authors wouldn't disagree that it would be nice to not have to do these optimizations! (Chris Lattner has said as much to me, for example.) Unfortunately, there…