Kevin Kofler wrote:
Jakub Jelinek wrote:
You are probably looking for bug compatibility, and that isn't something GCC guarantees, definitely not between major versions.
And that's one half of what I'm complaining about.
That sounds to me like you want the GCC team to keep their bugs forever when those bugs mask bugs in your code, so that you won't have to fix your bugs. Hopefully you didn't mean something quite so insane.
What about those documented extensions that got deprecated and later removed? That's the second half of what I'm complaining about: even things which are NOT bugs but documented extensions get deprecated and soon later removed.
IMHO a compiler should accept code whenever there's a sane interpretation of it, no matter whether it conforms to some standard or not (in fact, this used to be a GCC design principle, but sadly no longer is these days), and code which has been compiling for years definitely has a sane interpretation.
And what happens the day you need to compile that code with another compiler? Do you consider vendor lock-in through embrace-and-extend tactics to be a good thing when a free software project does it?
Björn Persson