On C/C++ undefined behaviours

[Nick Sabalausky]

"SK" <sk at metrokings.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.445.1282371389.13841.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 10:11 PM, Walter Bright
> <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
>> SK wrote:
>>>
>>> Do you mean to say:
>>> Instead of shipping the intermediate code, always ship source code.
>>
>> Yes.
>> Why doesn't it make sense?
>
> I love open source projects, but off the top of my head here are some
> reasons that's not a general substitute for TIMI for D:

I agree there are some benefits, but I suspect they may be smaller than they 
seem:

> 1) What about closed source software?

True. Although IMO (see my post in another branch of this thread) 
closed-source is rarely, if ever, beneficial anyway, despite how it's often 
perceived.

> 2) From-source builds may be more complex or resource consuming than
> could be accommodated on the machine the customer used to launch, e.g.
> a hand-held device.

I can't imagine it would be significantly more than something like JIT (or 
non-JIT interpreted code). Unless it's C++, of course.

> 3) The source may have sizable irrelevant content for a particular
> product instantiation, compile time conditionals, etc
>

- Unless I'm just becoming a dinosaur, sizeable content is rarely code. More 
likely other binary assets.
- Code can be huffman-compressed with significant size savings and 
quickly/easily unzipped on-the-fly. Even the GBA has some built-in 
on-the-fly unzipping ability that was often used in games (for assets 
though, not code).
- I don't think I've ever seen a cross-platform program that had 
platform-specific code that made up any more than a small fraction of the 
total code.

Of course, I'm not saying that using source as IL is universially, 
undeniably, better period, no matter what, or anything like that. I agree 
that binary IL has some nice aspects. I'm just not convinced that it's as 
much of an improvement over source-as-IL as it would initially seem.