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Subject: Re: The compiler is wrong sometimes (was Re: GCC 2.95 big step forward)

Author: Jon Dart

Date: 16:02:30 08/07/99

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I agree. Several years ago, I used to work for a compiler
company (which shall remain nameless). They made very highly
optimizing compilers which were sold for large sums to
major corporations working on very large programming projects.

At any given time, there were usually over 1000 bugs reported
against the compiler. Some were serious problems, and a few
were design flaws that would be very complex and expensive to
fix. The compiler itself was so complex that it was not uncommon
to fix one bug and have the fix eventually turn up as the
cause of some other problem (yes, they had regression tests,
but you can't catch everything that way).

With respect to gcc, you can look at the newsgroup gnu.gcc.bugs.
This is a pretty good compiler now but it seems that there are
still quite a few problems with it, even allowing that some
of the reported problems may be "user error."

--Jon



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