> but aside from the Linux kernel I've never encountered developers who put the blame on the compiler.
I encounter them frequently.
99.99% of the time it's undefined behavior and they're "wrong".
Frequently novices who have been failed by their teachers and documentation (see previous rant using atoi as an example of the poor quality of documentation about UB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14861917 .)
Less frequently, it's experienced devs half joking out of a need for catharsis.
Rarely, experienced devs finally getting to the end of their rope, and are finally beginning to seriously consider if they've got a codegen bug. They don't, but they're considering it. They know they were wrong the last 10 times they considered it, but they're considering it again damnit!
The linux kernel devs aren't quite unique in "just because you can, doesn't mean you should"ing their way into blaming the compiler for what could be argued to be defects in the standard or fundamental design of the language (the defect being making UB so common), but that's probably among the rarest slice of the pie of people blaming the compiler for UB. Few have the will to tilt at that windmill and voice their opinions when the compiler devs can easily just blame the standard - better to keep such unproductive rants close to heart instead, or switch to another language. Something actually productive.
0.01% of the time, it's a legitimate codegen bug on well-defined behavior code. Last one I tracked down to a bug tracker, was MSVC miscompiling 4x4 matrix multiplications by failing to spill a 17th value to stack when it only had 16 SSE register to work with. Caught by unit tests, but not by CI, since people updated compiler versions at their own random pace, and who runs `math_tests` on their personal machines when they're not touching `math`?
I encounter them frequently.
99.99% of the time it's undefined behavior and they're "wrong".
Frequently novices who have been failed by their teachers and documentation (see previous rant using atoi as an example of the poor quality of documentation about UB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14861917 .)
Less frequently, it's experienced devs half joking out of a need for catharsis.
Rarely, experienced devs finally getting to the end of their rope, and are finally beginning to seriously consider if they've got a codegen bug. They don't, but they're considering it. They know they were wrong the last 10 times they considered it, but they're considering it again damnit!
The linux kernel devs aren't quite unique in "just because you can, doesn't mean you should"ing their way into blaming the compiler for what could be argued to be defects in the standard or fundamental design of the language (the defect being making UB so common), but that's probably among the rarest slice of the pie of people blaming the compiler for UB. Few have the will to tilt at that windmill and voice their opinions when the compiler devs can easily just blame the standard - better to keep such unproductive rants close to heart instead, or switch to another language. Something actually productive.
0.01% of the time, it's a legitimate codegen bug on well-defined behavior code. Last one I tracked down to a bug tracker, was MSVC miscompiling 4x4 matrix multiplications by failing to spill a 17th value to stack when it only had 16 SSE register to work with. Caught by unit tests, but not by CI, since people updated compiler versions at their own random pace, and who runs `math_tests` on their personal machines when they're not touching `math`?