assert semantic change proposal

[John Carter via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 4 August 2014 at 02:31:36 UTC, John Carter wrote:

> But since an optimization has to be based on additional hard 
> information, they have, with every new version of gcc, used 
> that information both for warnings and optimization.

Hmm. Not sure I made that clear.

ie. Yes, it is possible that a defect may be injected by an 
optimization that assumes an assert is true when it isn't.

However, experience suggests that many (maybe two full orders of 
magnitude) more defects will be flagged.

ie. In terms of defect reduction it's a big win rather than a 
loss.

The tragedy of C optimization and static analysis is that the 
language is so loosely defined in terms of how it is used, the 
compiler has very little to go on.

This proposal looks to me to be a Big Win, because it gifts the 
compiler (and any analysis tools) with a huge amount of eminently 
usable information.