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From your description of the bug, I think even know which compiler you worked on. I worked on a competitors compiler. The state of embedded tools in the lates 90s and early 2000s was deplorable. I'm surprised we got anything working. (I went to work for the compiler team because I was so pissed off at how poorly they worked.)

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I should maybe have just said, it's not like it's sensitive information. It was @ Analog Devices, and given the engineer who was assigned to this bug I think it would have been for their TigerSHARC DSP. Trying to think who you might have worked for - Green Hills maybe?

The compiler itself felt well-written and there were some very smart people involved in developing it. And now that I think about it the bug wasn't different code being output but some value elsewhere in the generated binary itself - maybe some ELF header? I wish I could remember

Ah, I worked at ADI too. I rewrote the TigerSHARC register allocator (not adopted [complicated reasons, but Edinburgh wouldn't accept changes from the US]), and left the DSP group, and soon afterwards ADI.

I thought you meant TI. Their compiler would compile in the date of compilation as a string by default (it wasn't deadcode eliminated in the linker because it was sucked in their panic libraries, if memory serves).

In any case, yeah, ADI.

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