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Comment by JonChesterfield | Hacker News Reader

I'd be totally happy with C or C++ here if the attitude to type checking was "you've done weird things so you're on your own, be careful". Things like mutating a vtable could be fair game, just do it carefully.

However that's not the setup. C++ in particular, and increasingly C copying from it, optimises assuming you never do anything weird with pointers. This makes application code that doesn't do such things faster in a separate compilation world. It makes system code that does do such things undefined, forcing either compiler flags (fno-strict-aliasing and friends, aka writing in a different language that looks like the nominal one) or taking care around separate compilation to make sure the compiler never sees both sides of the boundary at the same time.

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If I had the skill, I would want to create my own C compiler that tried not to optimize things like this, e.g. don't optimize away infinite loops, don't optimize away signed overflow checks or do incorrect algebraic simplifications because signed overflow is undefined behavior, and by default act as though -fno-strict-aliasing were on. Add options for trapping on overflow or optimizing away overflow checks, signed or unsigned. Just do register allocation and minor constant folding (but again, don't act like signed overflow doesn't exist, and don't do constant folding across pointer writes if its address has been taken).

There exist open source C compilers that aren't GCC or Clang, such as TCC and Zig, but to my knowledge they all produce really, really bad assembly. There existed proprietary C compilers in the 1980s and 1990s that were written by one or two people that still produced solid assembly, so it's possible, just no one has done it, so Clang and GCC are the only free and open source options for decent assembly for C. Those two also have the downside of being C++ compilers, making them more complex than they need to be.

Maybe another option would be to improve an already existing open source C compiler's codegen than to write a new one from scratch again, assuming they'd agree with the above ideals.

It's on my to-do list for C. There's some mess around the preprocessor and parsing typedefs but it's not too horrendous. The guix bootstrap had a compiler for a largish subset of C written in scheme, that's probably a good start point if you don't want to go from scratch.

I like C as a notation for programming computers. I don't like the slight misstep -> UB -> everything is ruined philosophy of WG14.

(edit: it should be possible to emit LLVM IR with the right metadata to avoid the optimiser mangling it. In practice there would be a long tail of accidentally assuming C++ semantics that aren't justified by the IR, where bug fixes for those would be valid upstream. If one wanted to take on the probably thankless task of trying to remove ISO C/C++ assumptions from llvm.)

Rust already encountered lots of bugs when they tried to add all the aliasing info they had to the IR output.

> Things like mutating a vtable could be fair game, just do it carefully. However that's not the setup.

You can mutate a vtable without UB. A method may call the destructor on its this pointer and use placement-new to create a new object in place. The fact that any method of a class may do this combined with the fact that the placement-new object might be a more derived version of the destroyed object (so an existing Foo* continues to be valid) means that compiler can't cache vtable lookups for consecutive method calls, making nearly any optimization of virtual function calls impossible because you don't know the type or called function, unless you see the object being constructed (when the vptr is assigned) and inline each called function in turn.

(At some point C++ added a rule that basically reads "you're allowed to cache the vptr, if the accesses were written using the same pointer variable name". This doesn't work well for optimizing compilers because they'll quickly fold two equal values into a single variable in their internal languages and lose track of whether the user wrote two distinct variable names or not.)

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