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Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

> The key thing to understand is that if you use these flags, you opt-in to a non-standard C dialect.

Isn't all C with undefined behavior non-standard. Or is there a standard for undefined behavior (obviously not, I would think)?

I don't understand why those flags wouldn't be turned on by default. Or do they affect more than just undefined behavior?

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They affect performance, forcing the dev to insure they aren't doing unsafe/ill-defined things which is almost impossible on huge code bases in c/c++

They are unhappy being forced to write code that is free of undefined behavior?

It reminds me of the joke: Alice claims she is very fast at mental math. Bob asks "what's 4821 times 5997?" Alice replies "ten thousand." Bob says, "What, no, that's wrong, very wrong." Alice says, "But it was fast!"

Are you telling me C / C++ developers are like Alice? When given the choice between fast undefined behavior and slower but more likely to be correct undefined behavior, developers will choose the faster option that is more likely to be incorrect?

You seem to be assuming that on a large code base that you have top 1% programmers. I suppose that is the case for some places that are paying $500k average pay, but most businesses don't pay that and have average developers and a few top 5% if big enough. That's why tools that check for issues like linters and sanitizers help, especially if you make them part of "the process" for checkin

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