[llvm-dev] Provenance is not part of the existing C standard.

[Michael Kruse via llvm-dev]

Am Mi., 16. Juni 2021 um 19:32 Uhr schrieb Victor Yodaiken via
llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>:
>  Provenance is not part of the existing C standard. This proposal is by no means a settled issue. It would be interesting to hear what Clang/llvm developers think. Speaking for myself, I think the proposal has interesting ideas, but papers over a lot of difficult issues, lacks motivation, and potentially could have very negative effects on C semantics in its current state. I'd prefer to fix the C standard so that it is possible to write operating systems, malloc, and other important code in standard C before we consider adding such a far reaching change.

Provenance/N2676 is that fix of the C standard. All current C/C++
specifications have wordings that are obviously motivated to make some
compiler optimizations possible, but when those are implemented leads
to miscompilation of programs that most agree should have worked. The
current situation of implementing an optimization and only later
finding out that it is bad when someone complains about it is
obviously unsatisfying. As a result, the only safe option is to treat
a pointer like an integer, but this would also prohibit many
optimizations that an optimizing compiler nowadays is expected to do.

I am curious, what are those negative effects on semantics that you
are referring to? How would you fix the C standard?

Michael