My experience with a lot of the UB-is-bad crowd is that they don't have much of an appreciation for semantics in general. That is to say, they tend to react to particular compiler behavior, and they don't have any suggestions for how to rectify the situation in a way that
preserves consistent semantics. And when you try to pin down the semantics, you usually end up with a compiler that has to "do what I mean, not what I said."
A salient example that people often try on me, that I don't find persuasive, is the null pointer check:
void foo(int *x) {
int val = *x;
if (!x) return;
/* do real stuff */
}
"The compiler is stupid for eliminating that null check!" "So you want the code to crash because of a null pointer dereference then." "No, no, no! Do the check first, and dereference only when it's not null!" "That's not what you said..."
A salient example that people often try on me, that I don't find persuasive, is the null pointer check:
"The compiler is stupid for eliminating that null check!" "So you want the code to crash because of a null pointer dereference then." "No, no, no! Do the check first, and dereference only when it's not null!" "That's not what you said..."