Re:The Dangers of Super Smart Compilers
by scott_s on Sunday December 20, 2015 @03:31PM
(#10768192)
C and C++ applications include lots and lots of headers from the systems and third party libraries. Dead code is common in such circumstances, and programmers would drown in a sea of dead code eliminated warnings.
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But you can still see: is the source of this code something the user has written in a .c file, or something that came from a header file or from macro expansion, and only warn about the former. Granted this is difficult, because LLVM is multi-layered, but it's not impossible in the general case.
I think it's extremely difficult, to the point of not being practical. When you get to the point of the compiler that it's applying these optimizations, that the code came from a .c or .h file has been long thrown away.