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0 pointssteveklabnik8mo ago0 comments

It is true that it won't tell you, for sure. It's just that UB means something very specific when discussing language semantics.

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0x1ceb00da8mo ago

I see. These optimisations might not be UB as understood in compiler lingo, but it is a kind of "undefined behaviour", as in anything could happen. And honestly the problems it might cause don't look that different from those caused by UB (from compiler lingo). Not to mention, using unsafe for writing optimised code will generate same-ish code in both debug and release mode, so DX will be better too.

tuckerman8mo ago

As an example, parts of the C++ standard library (none of the core language I believe though) are covered by complexity requirements but implementations can still vary widely, e.g. std::sort needs to be linearithmic but someone could still implement a very slow version without it being UB (even if it was quadratic or something it still wouldn't be UB but wouldn't be standards conforming).

UB is really about the observable behavior of the abstract machine which is limited to the reads/writes to volatile data and I/O library calls [1]

[1] http://open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/open/n2356/intro.html

Edit: to clarify the example

tialaramex8mo ago

I understand why Alexander Stepanov thought the complexity requirements were a good idea, but I am not convinced that in practice this delivers value. Worse, I don't see much sign C++ programmers care.

You mentioned particularly the C++ unstable sort std::sort. Famously although C++ 11 finally guarantees O(n log n) worst case complexity the libc++ stdlib didn't conform. They'd shipped worst case O(n squared) instead.

The bug report saying essentially "Hey, your sort is defective", was opened in 2014. By Orson Peters. It took until 2021 to fix it.

Ar-Curunir8mo ago

The optimization not getting applied doesn't mean that "anything could happen". Your code would just run slower. The result of this computation would still be correct and would match what you would expect to happen. This is the opposite of undefined behaviour, where the result is literally undefined, and, in particular, can be garbage.

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