His point as I understand it is that the people who would be doing the fixing are unlikely to agree that the defects he is reporting are actually defects, and that reporting them is therefore futile, absent a shift in consensus on the topic of undefined behavior. The paper exists in order to help promote that shift.
This is not an effective way, at all, to promote such a shift, of course. It's also not like this is the first paper. There are plenty of papers (he even cites a bunch) saying the same thing. So i'm not sure why anyone would think this would do much ...
Convince any of the 100+ vendors producing gcc forks to do it, have their customers sing their praises, and others will follow.
yelling about it on the internet is not likely to do much :)
> One of the things this person misses is a lot of these are undefined with the explicit goal to let compiler authors take advantage of them.
It doesn't look like it's missing it to me:
"C compiler maintainers also claim that these “optimizations” give speedups for other programs. However, that would require programmers to convert their C* programs to “C” first, a process which can produce worse code (Section 3), and more importantly, requires an effort that would be much more effective if directed at source-level optimizations."
The goal is to let compiler authors take advantage of undefined behavior for, among other things, performance. The counterclaim is that these goals are noble, but that letting compiler authors take advantage of undefined behavior as a means to achieve those goals is, unfortunately, counterproductive.
> Convince any of the 100+ vendors producing gcc forks to do it, have their customers sing their praises, and others will follow.
So... yell (positive things) on the internet?
> yelling about it on the internet is not likely to do much :)
Oh. Well, for what it's worth, I agree. As such, I spend my energy investing in staying the hell away from C when possible. I then yell positive things on the internet about alternatives for my own amusement. Still doesn't do much, but it does a little.
