> > > Specifically, because we value reliability over speed and strict > > > standard conformance... > > > Seems to me that programs that strictly meet the standard of the language > > they are written in would be more reliable than programs that are written > > in some ill-defined language. > > A lot of C programmers don't really understand aliasing rules. If this > wasn't deemed to be a problem, no-one would have even thought of adding > code to gcc so that i can warn about some aliasing violations. ;-)
Sure there's badly-written code out there and sure there are reasons for not wanting to clean it up, but I find it odd that you'd invoke RELIABILITY as one of them. The aliases rules exist not just so that the COMPILER can know what can and can't alias, but so that the READER of the code can too. Code that's hard to read is hard to maintain and hence less reliable. If the goal really were, as you say, reliability, then the right approach would seem to me to be to work towards rewriting the code to avoid aliasing issues.
