C and C++ prioritize performance over correctness (2023)

As a pure C programmer [1], let me post my full agreement: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/08/the-scourge-of-00ub/ .

[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/02/why-i-use-c-when-i-believe-i...

To quote your article:

> The question is: should compiler authors be able to do whatever they want? I argue that they should not.

My question is: I see so many C programmers bemoaning the fact that modern compilers exploit undefined behavior to the fullest extent. I almost never see those programmers actually writing a "reasonable"/"friendly"/"boring" C compiler. Why is no one willing to put their ~money~ time where their mouth is?

> I almost never see those programmers actually writing a "reasonable"/"friendly"/"boring" C compiler. Why is no one willing to put their ~money~ time where their mouth is?

Because it is not much harder to simply write a new language and you can discard all the baggage? Lots of verbiage gets spilled about undefined behavior, but things like the preprocessor and lack of "slices" are way bigger faults of C.

Proebsting's Law posits that compiler optimizations double performance every 20 years. That means that you can implement the smallest handful of compiler optimizations in your new language and still be within a factor of 2 of the best compilers. And people are doing precisely that (see: Zig, Jai, Odin, etc.).

I was willing to, but the consensus was that people wouldn't use it.

C and C++ programmers complain about UB, but they don't really care.

TCC is probably the closest thing we have to that, and for me personally, I made all of my stuff build on it. I even did extra work to add a C99 (instead of C11) mode to make TCC work.

Shouldn't your blog post then condemn the C community at large for failing to use a more "reasonable" C compiler instead of complaining about compiler authors that "despite holding the minority world view, [...] have managed to force it on us by fiat because we have to use their compilers"?

You don't have to use their compilers. Most people do, because they either share this "minority" world view or don't care.

I'm willing to write a C compiler that detects all undefined behavior but instead of doing something sane like reporting it or disallowing it just adds the code to open a telnet shell with root privileges. Can't wait to see the benchmarks.

> doing something sane like reporting it or disallowing it

This is only possible if you check for it at runtime and that's a tradeoff most C programmers don't like.

My blog post doesn't condemn the C community at large because it was the HN comments on that post where I found out that the C community is a bunch of hypocrites.