On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 06:42:30PM -0400, Robert Dewar wrote: > >[In fact, > >after GCC does something to warn users about this, it'll be > >much "safer" than those other compilers.] > > For sure you want a warning, the compiler should never be > removing explicit tests in the users code without generating > a warning I would think.
I vaguely recall a paper from Dawson Engler's group (the people who did the Stanford Checker and Coverity) about warnings for dead code removal. They are often bugs if seen in straight-line code, but macros as well as inlining of functions will produce many warnings of this kind. They focused their work on addressing what the user could be expected to know, the idea being to issue warnings if the code on a single level is redundant, but suppress warnings if the redundant text came from macros or inlining.
