DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language
DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language
Posted May 4, 2022 19:06 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language by mathstuf
Parent article: DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language
> That was me I believe.
That was different discussion.
> There is work to figure out what these rules actually are and how to put them into standard-ese ("pointer zap" is the search term to use for the paper titles).This would have been great if, while these rules are not finalized, compilers produced working programs by default.
Instead clang not just breaks programs by default, it even refuses to provide -fno-provenance switch which may be used to stop miscompiling them!
And it's not as if rules were actually designed, presented to C/C++ committee (like happend with DR 236) then rejected because of typical committee politics. At least then you can say “yes, changes to the standard are not accepted yet, but you can read about our rules here”.
Instead, for two decades compilers silently miscompiled valid programs and their developers offered no rules which software developers can follow to develop programs which wouldn't be miscompiled!
That's an act of deliberate sabotage. And, worst of all, it have only gained prominence because of Rust: since Rust developers actually care about program correctness (and because LLVM miscompiled programs which they believed to be correct) they tried to find the actual list of rules that govern provenance in C/C++… and found nothing.
Yes, this provenance fiasco is awful blow against C/C++ compiler developers. You couldn't say “standard is a treaty, you have to follow it” and then turn around and add “oh, but it's too hard for me to follow it, thus I would violate it whenever it would suit me”. That's not a treaty anymore, it's a joke.
But even then: the way forward is not to ignore the rules, but an attempt to patch them. Ideally new compilers should be written which would actually obey some rules, but that's too big of an endeavor, I don't think it'll happen.