Re:On the Madness of Optimizing Compilers
by MichaelBurge on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @03:16AM
(#11244074)
I run into so many compiler bugs. Examples: g++, ghc, booc. I remember one time playing around with Unity3D, and for some reason decided to use the Boo language to write my code. I ended up having to patch booc to work around about a dozen different bugs.
There's also the time I caused a kernel panic on CentOS 5 by running g++ on my code. It did so reliably, so I moved development to CentOS 6.
Older gdbs on CentOS 4 will segfault if you run it on a binary compiled with ghc and ask for a backtrace.
One time, I wrote a Perl module that unintentionally trashed the Perl interpreter's error tracking information. So if the module compiled, it worked fine. But if you had even a single variable mis-spelled or missing semicolon, all you'd get from perl is the error "Unknown error".
There's also the time I caused a kernel panic on CentOS 5 by running g++ on my code. It did so reliably, so I moved development to CentOS 6.
Older gdbs on CentOS 4 will segfault if you run it on a binary compiled with ghc and ask for a backtrace.
One time, I wrote a Perl module that unintentionally trashed the Perl interpreter's error tracking information. So if the module compiled, it worked fine. But if you had even a single variable mis-spelled or missing semicolon, all you'd get from perl is the error "Unknown error".
Or even something as simple as writing a negative integer literal bugs out ghc: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/9533
Compilers are absolutely riddled with bugs.