Some people care more about compiler speed than the correctness? I would love to meet these imaginary people that are fine with a compiler that is straight up broken. Emitting working code is the baseline, not some preference slider.
replyLet's pretend, for just a second, that the people who do, having been able to learn how to program, are not absolute fucking morons. Straight up broken is obviously not useful, so maybe the conclusions you've jumped to could use some reexamination.
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replya compiler introducing bugs into code it compiles is a nightmare thankfully few have faced. The only thing worse would be a CPU bug like the legendary Pentium bug. Imagine you compile something like Postgres only to have it crash in some unpredictable way. How long do you stare at Postgres source before suspecting the compiler? What if this compiler was used to compile code in software running all over cloud stacks? Bugs in compilers are very bad news, they have to be correct.
reply> a compiler introducing bugs into code it compiles is a nightmare thankfully few have faced
replyIs this true? It’s not an everyday thing, but when using less common flags, or code structures, or targets… every few years I run into a codegen issue. It’s hard to imagine going through a career without a handful…
Yeah, my current boss spent time weeding out such hardware bugs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.11519 (EDIT: maybe https://x.com/Tesla_AI/status/1930686196201714027 is a more relevant citation)
replyThey found a bimodal distribution in failures over the lifetime of chips. Infant mortality was well understood. Silicon aging over time was much less well understood, and I still find surprising.