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Comment by copsarebastards

> This is a case of following the letter of the law (in this case the C standard) while disregarding its spirit: all the undefined behaviour was so that C compilers could accomodate for odd architectures while remaining close to the metal, not so that compiler programmers could go out of their way to turn their compiler into a mine field.

Computers don't have spirits; they work as you tell them to work, to the letter, and if you're remaining close to the metal, your language will indicate that fact. Optimizing undefined behaviors doesn't make C a minefield; low-level programming for different architectures just is inherently a minefield. C was a minefield before these optimizations were added.

Rust is extremely impressive because they've found so many ways to do high-level programming while maintaining low-level performance. But they can only do that because they have the benefit of the 4 decades of programming language research that have occurred since the basics of C were designed.

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