http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=50724
--- Comment #32 from Michael Matz <matz at gcc dot gnu.org> 2011-10-18 01:33:10 UTC --- To be honest, this bug report is not under any discussion anymore. I tried to get any sort of sanity, but in the end it's all about egos; you won't get what you want, it's really useless to reopen this particular report. The libstdc++ maintainers aren't as sensible as the Apple maintainers, the middle-end maintainers aren't as useful as they should be (hiding behind less than useful "but that's how it's documented" arguments). And just generally the responses to understandable requests are more than lacking in defense of not implementing it. (I think it's hopeless to include even more justifications for your use cases, it'll just be food for the reverse-trolls) He's not a troll. The bug-closers _are_, and the answers to closing are severely lacking in any sort of justification. And yes, I'm aware of past discussions. And no, I don't think any of it has much merit for the discussion at hand. They are either exaggerating (but, OMG, what to do with the RTL "<>" -> "!=" transformation???) (answer, "nothing"), and "it's all quite difficult", or "but currently we do builtin_isnan to 'x!=x', and we can't recover from that" or they're not capturing the problem at all. Many of the justifications even just turn back to "but that's how it's documented since <whenever>", and that's even more sorry than any other sort of "justification". Just because a past mistake was documented as such doesn't mean it's right. So, reporter, please go away, GCC won't fix your problem, even though it would be reasonable to change. Instead I'd advise you to some other more reasonable compiler, LLVM, or maybe a commercial one. GCC is all about defending past mistakes in order not to change anything, not at all about being helpful to the user. >From the proponents of the current state of affairs I would appreciate at least a hint of where this was "discussed to death" already, the three PRs from Andrew certainly are not a case. I'd speculate most of them were argued from the point of "let's not change anything but rather argue that current behaviour is the right one (because that's less work, although I won't say that)".