> you can never really trust the compiler

That's interesting, I've had the opposite experience; the few times I think I'm hitting a compiler bug it turns out the compiler is telling what I'm doing wrong but I'm misinterpreting what it's saying. Not saying this applies to you though. Was this with recent versions?

Having said that, with templates and macros I very rarely get a c compilation error (ie; an actual bug), but these are usually because I'm accidentally doing something silly like recursing compile time generation. The compiler should catch these, and it's only rare cases it doesn't.

In my experience writing a game engine in opengl the language has been rock solid and very fast. For me, the core language has been absolutely fantastic and very reliable.