How can Autoconf help with the transition to stricter compilation defaults?

[Jason Merrill]

On Sat, Nov 12, 2022 at 7:44 PM Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

> On 2022-11-11 07:11, Aaron Ballman wrote:
> > Clang doesn't require such a linker (we work with various system
> linkers).
>
> As long as the system linkers continue to work as they have
> traditionally worked, we're fine.
>
> > the frontend perspective, we can't tell the difference between
> > "trust me this is safe because it never gets executed" and "this is a
> > CVE"
>
> If some system linker ever attempts to reject links with mismatched
> signatures, Autoconf-generated code will need to have a way to shut that
> off. I hope Clang maintainers can be cajoled into supporting that, if
> the time comes. Perhaps there can be a #pragma, or a compile-time
> option, to do that.
>

There has been discussion of the problems with compile-time options
elsewhere in the thread, but the #pragma idea sounds promising, as older
compilers can just ignore it.

Jason