Re: type based aliasing again

["Harvey J. Stein" <hjstein@bfr.co.il>]

I'd like to chip in my 2 cents on this thread by stating my support
for Richard Stallman's proposal wrt gcc's alias analysis &
optimization.

There's a lot of legacy code & even more code written by users not
intimately versed in the latest ANSI standards and its ramifications.
Not to mention the massive amount of third party code that needs to be
compiled & supported by people.  Forcibly breaking it with the next
gcc release will render gcc unusable for many people.  I've seen
recent versions of gcc break code we have here that we can't fix
directly for a number of reasons.  One example is code generated by
p2c where the pascal is still actively mantained, and no one has both
the
time and knowledge here to modify p2c to generate code which conforms
to strict ANSI semantics.

gcc has never intentially miscompiled code because it's not portable.
It's also never forced people to write portable code.  In fact, there
are plenty of enhancements that GCC supports which don't conform to
any standards.  It seems byzantine to break code not conforming to one
particular paragraph of the ANSI standard while allowing all sorts of
other deviations from the standard.  Especially when this is done
solely for the purpose of better optimization.  Even more so when it
need not be done.

-- 
Harvey Stein
Bloomberg LP
hjstein@bfr.co.il