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This propensity for today’s working programs to be broken tomorrow is what I mean when I say these languages are not future proof. In principle a big C/C++ program that has been extensively tested would be future-proof if we never upgraded the compiler, but this is often not a viable option. There is a long, sad history of programmers becoming seriously annoyed at the GCC developers over the last 10 years due to GCC’s increasingly sophisticated code generation exploiting the undefinedness of signed integer overflows. Similarly, any time a compiler starts to do a better job at interprocedural optimization (this has recently been happening with LLVM, I believe) a rash of programs that does stupid stuff like not returning values from non-void functions breaks horribly. Programmers used to think it was OK to read uninitialized storage and then compilers began destroying code that did this. Developers need to take undefined behavior more seriously, because the undefined consequences are catching up.
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They don't need to work beyond 2036 anyway, right?
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