There's also the perpetually annoying 'a function calling itself in an infinite loop is UB'
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Check out this example using a loop:
gist.github.com/thestinger/7e6
LLVM considers noreturn to be an effect, and yet it doesn't consider a function that *may* not return to have an effect. This is a bug, but an intentional one because they chose to keep an unsafe optimization around.
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They properly preserve functions that are pure but not nounwind, such as a chain of them like foo(); foo(); foo(); being optimized to foo(); but never being completely removed. They are missing an attribute for 'returns' or 'halts' and yet optimize without checking anyways.
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So, even though it's known that this is broken for many years, they have kept the optimization enabled. No one has been motivated to deal with implementing a 'halts' attribute and adding support for detecting / propagating it in the function attribute pass and making it required.
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That's just broken, but not too surprising, since it's not uncommon for compilers to have miscompile bugs in tough and unusual corner cases. But the context of this conversation is: do you need a new compiler to fix UB?
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The fact that llvm has bugs doesn't really change the answer. Even a compiler that was designed to avoid UB could have miscompile bugs. Also, the context of the conversation allows for making changes to llvm - so this seems like the kind of thing that could be fixed.
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I guess I don't understand the context. It seems to be about C, and I don't see how you can resolve that problem for C without coming up with a model to enforce a form of memory safety. What is the scope of UB that should be avoided? You mean, for a language like Rust or Swift?
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I was just responding about the infinite recursion thing, particularly because I don't believe that's actually undefined in C. It doesn't talk about a stack, let alone saying that overflowing it in undefined or that infinite recursion can just be removed. I think that's wrong.
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I don't think features like opt-in to undefined behavior on signed or unsigned overflow (nsw, nuw) are an issue in LLVM since frontends can avoid emitting it (like Rust and Swift). It's only a major issue when there isn't a decent alternative or when UB is poorly defined/unclear.
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For example, various shifts, casts and floating point operations are undefined, so if you want to use them safely you need to wrap everything in branches which the compiler is unlikely to optimize out. I think the solution to that is just providing more specific variants of them.
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If you want overflow to be handled a certain way, you would use the instruction for those semantics and it would just be lowered inefficiently on architectures without native support. If you want efficiency you could have the frontend switch it based on the architecture targeted.
LLVM is overly focused on C and takes too many shortcuts that are allowed for C but don't work for other languages. When someone talks about these issues for C, I don't really get the point. These issues are what goes horribly wrong for C in the real world even in 1% of cases.
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But you can make C not have the UB issues while retaining the ability to fuck with memory directly. Such a thing can be defined and it’s what lots of systems code expects.
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