type control of builtins; `&var;'

[Martin v. Loewis]

> I consider it necessary to enable explicit type specification of
> builtin functions for particular target and compilation- time type
> checking for them.

Thanks for your bug report. I'm not really sure I understand what you
are asking for; perhaps you have a patch you want to submit?

> After all, it should be useful to confirm what is said in
> http://www.gnu.org/software/reliability.html :)

There is a number of ways to achieve reliability. By far the most
successful approach is by means of testing. In fact,

http://www.gnu.org/software/reliability.html#WhyReliable

points to testing and user involvement as a primary source of
reliability of free software.

Whatever mechanism you have in mind: It may make gcc more flexible. To
make it more reliable, you need testing. Even with your scheme
applied, you still need to test whether it works.

> A completely unrelated question.  In msg being referenced (of 23.10) I
> described a phenomenon that looked strange to me.  With -O2 option a
> statement with no possible side effect kept affecting compiler output
> and causing otherwise unnecessary use of stack (to allocate a var that
> otherwise is stored in register).  What magic combination of
> optimization options will fix it?

I could not find this message in the archives, so I can only guess. If
you use C++, obtaining "this" will make the object live on stack,
because its address was obtained.

Regards,
Martin