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Comment by sjolsen | Hacker News Reader

Which is exactly the motivation behind implementation-defined behavior. There's a broad range of "how much detail do you put in the specification" between the extremes of "this is exactly how the program should behave" and "this program fragment is ill-formed, therefore we make no guarantees about the behavior of the overall program whatsoever."

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Implementation-defined behavior at best just tells you that the behavior is guaranteed to be deterministic (or not). You still cannot reason about the behavior of the program by just looking at the source.

And I'm not sure if optimizations such as those that require weak aliasing would be possible if the behavior was simply implementation-defined.

The desire to reason about the precise behavior of a program and the desire to take advantage of different behavior on different platforms are fundamentally at odds. Like I said, there's a broad range of just how much of the specification you leave up to the implementation; it's an engineering trade-off like any other.

My point is that by leaving a behavior to be defined by the implementation you're not making it any easier to write portable code, but you may be making some optimizations impossible.

That's not entirely true. Regarding portability, the layout of structs for example is implementation-defined to allow faster (by virtue of alignment) accesses or more compact storage depending on the system, but it's perfectly possible to write portable code that works with the layout using offsetof and sizeof (edit: and, of course, regular member access :) ).

That said, I would agree that, on the whole, C leans too heavily on under-specified behavior of every variety. It's just not an absolute.

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