Re: gmake-4.2.90 regression (segmentation fault in sum_up_to_nul )
From:
David A. Wheeler
Subject:
Re: gmake-4.2.90 regression (segmentation fault in sum_up_to_nul )
Date:
Tue, 24 Sep 2019 17:46:13 -0400
It is extremely dangerous to dereference outside and allocated range, and it really should never be done today. As you well know, in C that is undefined. However over the last few years the C compilers have been getting increasingly aggressive to implement optimizations that assume that no one would ever do anything undefined. So even if it happens to work on your test systems today, it is increasingly unlikely to work over the next few years. At one time you could call C a high-level assembler, but that is simply no longer the case.
If you want the code to be reliable, and presumably you do, then you really want to avoid this kind of undefined behavior.