"Experimental" features in releases

[Dale Johannesen]

On Apr 17, 2006, at 2:31 PM, Richard Guenther wrote:

> On 4/18/06, Ivan Novick <ivan@0x4849.net> wrote:
>> I am a gcc user at a fininancial institution and IMHO it would not  
>> be a
>> good idea to have non-production ready functionality in gcc.  We are
>> trying to use gcc for mission critical functionality.
>
> It has been always the case that additional options not enabled with
> any regular -O level gets less testing and more likely has bugs.   
> So for
> mission critical functionality I would strongly suggest to stay  
> with -O2
> and not try to rely on not thoroughly tested combinations of  
> optimization
> options.

I'd go further:  you should not be trusting a compiler (gcc or any  
other) to be correct in "mission critical" situations.  Finding a  
compiler without bugs is not a realistic expectation.  Every compiler  
release I'm familiar with has had bugs.

> So from my point of view, the situation with -ftree-loop-linear is
> fine - it's ICEing after all, not producing silently wrong-code.  For
> experimental options (where
> I would include all options not enabled by -O[123s]) known wrong- 
> code bugs
> should be fixed.

The case of this in 20256 did produce silent bad code when it was  
reported, but that seems to have changed.