We are forking D

[Walter Bright]

On 1/8/2024 4:51 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On the other extreme, there were also benchmarks that were actually
> measuring background noise instead of the function it's purportedly
> benchmarking, because the optimizer has elided the entire function call
> after realizing that the return value is never used.

I'm painfully aware of this. My compiler (Datalight C) was the first PC compiler 
to sport a data flow analysis optimizer. It determined that the benchmark code 
didn't do anything useful, and so deleted it.

The reviewer never contacted me about this, he just wrote the benchmark roundup 
article saying that the Datalight compiler was buggy because it didn't execute 
the benchmark code.

About a year later, other compilers had implemented DFA, and of course this time 
the reporter got it right.

I'm still mad about that :-/