https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=116457
--- Comment #4 from Kees Cook <kees at outflux dot net> --- This feature is designed as a "security through obscurity" feature that has real-world benefits to specialized high-security deployments where performance is not a concern. It is never expected to be compatible with the C standard; it operates as a language extension. And it is C only -- there's no desire to have this work with C++. As for "security issue waiting to happen", I'd be curious to hear what you're considering. Both designated initialization and casting is already explicitly considered in the Clang and GCC plugin implementations. So, no doubt, it's a really wild feature, but it is already in reliable real-world use. Not bringing it upstream into GCC doesn't make much sense to me. It's a pretty isolated change and doesn't impact any later stages of compilation.
