Hacker News Reader

What happens when you change random functions in your C compiler? The C standard library and compiler are not independent, both make up a C implementation, which behaviour is described by the C standard.

View on HN

Yes, though it's worth stating that it's a little more nuanced than that, since (for historical, path-dependent reasons) the compiler and libc are often independent projects (and libc often includes a bunch of other stuff beyond what the standard/compiler need).

This is the case, for example, on macOS, FreeBSD, and Linux.

Cute username, BTW.

You are right, it depends, whether you write C (from the standard) or a specific dialect from your vendor (everybody does in practice). In the latter case, you need to know about the rules of the compiler. But to allow optimization, these are often similar, so that the compiler assumes these have the behaviour of the implementation, that the compiler is tailored against.

> Cute username, BTW.

Thanks, I was to lazy to think of a real name, so this is the timestamp, I created the account.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com