I think the 'else' added in the proposed patch makes it too complicated for GCC to optimize out the __attribute__((error)) checks before they're considered to be errors. It's not needed so it's probably best to just avoid doing something like that. The runtime checks can't get false positives from overly complex code but the compile-time ones depend on GCC being able to reliably optimize them out.
This might be easier for GCC: if (__builtin_constant_p(size) && condition_a) { compiletimeerror(); } if (__builtin_constant_p(size) && condition_b) { compiletimeerror(); } than the current: if (__builtin_constant_p(size)) { if (condition_a) { compiletimeerror(); } if (condition_b) { compiletimeerror(); } } but it hasn't had a false positive like that with the current code. Removing __noreturn is making the inline code more complex from GCC's perspective too, but hopefully it's neither reducing coverage (i.e. not making it less able to resolve __builtin_object_size - intuitively it shouldn't impact it much but you never know) or making GCC unable to deal with the compile-time checks.