I am a huge C fan but this is not true at all. C has tons of pitfalls, especially with modern UB-aggressive optimizing compilers. There are a lot of rules you need to be aware of that are not naturally-occurring results of the fundamentals.

You put your finger on the problem: "modern UB-aggressive optimising compilers". C, the language, is actually quite simple (if not easy). The crazy stuff that compiler writers have been doing recently while aggressively mis-reading the C standard is the problem and does make things very complicated.

Why "misreading"?

From 1.1:

"The X3J11 charter clearly mandates the Committee to codify common existing practice."

Their emphasis, not mine. So is there a mandate to use the definitions of the standard to invalidate common existing practice? Clearly not. Yet that is what is happening.

More from the standard (defining UB):

"Undefined behavior gives the implementor license not to catch certain program errors that are difficult to diagnose. It also identifies areas of possible conforming language extension: the implementor may augment the language by providing a definition of the officially undefined behaviour."

Does it say "Undefined behaviour gives implementors license to add new optimisations that break existing programs"? Clearly and unambiguously not.

See http://port70.net/~nsz/c/c89/rationale/a.html#1

> More from the standard (defining UB):

Your quote is not from the normative text of the standard, but from the non-normative rationale. Note however that it explicitly says that programs that contain undefined behaviors are erroneous, and that the implementation is not required to emit diagnostics for the UB. Pretty clearly this allows implementations to optimize erroneous programs into whatever they think is funny this week.

The normative text of the standard is pretty unambiguous:

    undefined behavior
    behavior, upon use of a nonportable or erroneous program construct or of erroneous data,
    for which this International Standard imposes no requirements

Utter nonsense. I use that word carefully, but in this case it is absolutely appropriate.

Compiler optimisations per an old but very useful definition aren't allowed to change the visible behaviour of programs (in terms of output, obviously they are allowed to change execution times).

For example, even just a couple of years ago the compilers I used would execute a loop that sums the first n integers. Nowadays compilers detect this and replace the loop with the result. While this isn't particularly useful, because probably the only reason you're summing the first n integers in a loop is to do some measurements, it is (a) a perfectly legal optimisation and (b) happened after 1990.

Unsurprisingly, you left out the second part of the (later) definition:

   NOTE Possible undefined behavior ranges from ignoring the situation completely with unpredictable
    results, to behaving during translation or program execution in a documented manner characteristic of the
    environment (with or without the issuance of a diagnostic message), to terminating a translation or
    execution (with the issuance of a diagnostic message).

It is not part of the normative definition, which says "for which this International Standard imposes no requirements". In ISO standards, notes are without exception non-normative.

Although I think they really should add your proposed text as an additional example, as their current set of examples is evidently confusingly incomplete :-)

No it doesn't say that. It says that they are either "nonportable" or "erroneous". I'll take "nonportable" for 400, please.

Options like GCC's -fwrapv/-ftrapv and -fno-strict-aliasing are examples of language extensions that are essentially implementation defined UB.

Edit: Of course you could argue that things where hardware difference are a likely motivation such as signed integer overflow ought not to be UB in the first place, but instead left as implementation defined in the standard, but in that case your issue is with the C standard committee, not with implementers.

Maybe I live in a C reality distortion field. :)

    void free_circularly_linked_list(struct node *head) {
      struct node *tmp = head;
      do {
        struct node *next = tmp->next;
        free(tmp);
        tmp = next;
      } while (tmp != head);
    }

I've written up a demo with your code, running it through several analysers:

https://gist.github.com/technion/1b12c9b4581e915241d9483c5c2...

The tl;dr here is that tis-interpreter is a fantastic new tool, as it correctly complains about this.

Edit: I also note a departure from yester-year, where every linting tool would only manage to complain about unchecked malloc() returns.

    void free_circularly_linked_list(struct node *head) {
      struct node *tmp = head->next;
      while (1) {
        if (tmp == head) {
          /* Has to be a separate case since even assigning
           * a dangling pointer is UB I believe? */
          free(tmp);
          break;
        } else {
          struct node *next = tmp->next;
          free(tmp);
          tmp = next;
        }
      }
    }

    void free_circularly_linked_list(struct node *head)
    {
      struct node *a = head->next;
      while (a != head) {
        struct node *b = a->next;
        free(a);
        a = b;
      }
      free(head);
    }

Let's say head value is "10" and the memory at "10" is {..., next: "10"}

After the first iteration we will have:

Head: "10" Next: "10" Temp: "10"

With "10" pointing to freed memory. But why do we care? We are not dereferencing it, are we?

(I think I am missing something very obvious)

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1570.pdf is the most recent draft before the official, purchase-only C11 was published according to http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/standards. I don't know if it's identical, but it should be close, and it's free.

Absolutely not.

The problem with C is that even a C master can't necessarily write correct code, because C is a very programmer-unfriendly language, making developers remember to do various actions manually and perform error-prone calculations.

C++ is definitely harder to master (after many years, I can't say I master every corner of the language), but it's much easier to write correct code in C++ and it will be just as fast, run on as many platforms, etc, etc.

C lost this battle a long time ago, it's surviving because of nostalgia, still having good street cred and inertia. The number of domains where one must use C is shrinking and now that we also have Go and Rust this will accelerate. All for the better, really.

I doubt that. Kernels, drivers, embedded devices (not IoT), GNU world, are all highly C oriented. Want to develop for a customer with unknown unix variant? Want to develop a tool everyone are going to use, either on Linux/BSD/Solaris? C is the only option.

> but it's much easier to write correct code in C++ and it will be just as fast

Writing correct and fast C++ code at the same time was never an option; even today, with "safe" pointers, people are still confused how to correctly use shared_ptr<>.

> now that we also have Go and Rust this will accelerate

Some places where C is still a strong contender:

* good tooling - debuggers, memory leak detectors, years of experience with compilers on various platforms

* well understood language - C has dark corners and they are documented well

* interfacing with everything else - from devices to libraries and languages