Perhaps worth noting that a lot of this gcc quirkiness (and, via peer pressure, clang quirkiness) was spawned in response to overly brittle copyright laws and enforcement. (The expiration times have been extended excessively to satisfy the likes of Disney, and the enforcement seems to necessarily be focussed on stupid issues and most people tend to be uninformed about the nature and character of the laws and issues.)
To avoid the specter of copyright being enforced on computer software (where the code tends to closely follow the spec), the gcc maintainers (fsf and whoever else rms managed to recruit to that cause). adopted a deliberate policy of extending and reinterpreting the specifications and standards. As noted in that writeup, the consequences have not always been good (and some pruning is probably warranted). Fortunately, OpenBSD takes a more deliberate approach and this can help temper some of that silliness (in part, through peer pressure). That said, the laws themselves are a motivation here. In its current form, copyright law has been overly hostile to industry and coding in some ways, and presumably overly tolerant in some other ways (because people have limited time and attention). The open source community has been one successful workaround for this state of affairs. But the "undefined behavior" sillinesses are one kind of example of where the community misleads. Another successful workaround, in industry, has been to offload manufacturing to China (which has not agreed to these laws). But that introduces language barriers and other problems (which are out of scope for this mailing list). Anyways, it seems like industry should be demanding laws which enable it to get its work done, but this isn't a subject suitable for polite conversation. I wish I had a good answer here, but I don't... That said, ... for now at least, focusing on practical issues hasn't stopped being essential. Responses to this message should go to me and not the list. Thanks, -- Raul On Thu, Jan 17, 2019 at 8:07 AM Mayuresh Kathe <mayur...@kathe.in> wrote: > > Don't know if this has been discussed here before, but I found the > following excerpt from the article at > http://www.yodaiken.com/2018/12/31/undefined-behavior-and-the-purpose-of-c/ > unnerving; > ... often the writers of the ISO C Standard have thrown up their hands > and labeled the effects of non-portable and potentially non-portable > operations "undefined behavior" for which they provided only a fuzzy > guideline. Unfortunately, the managers of the gcc and clang C compilers > have increasingly ignored the guideline and ignored well-established > well-understood practice, producing often bizarre and dangerous results > ... >
