Re: Is gcc thread-unsafe?

Linus Torvalds
2007-10-25T23:14:54Z

On Fri, 26 Oct 2007, Andi Kleen wrote:
> >
> > Marking volatile I think is out of the question. To start with,
> > volatile creates really poor code (and most of the time we actually
> > do want the code in critical sections to be as tight as possible).
>
> Poor code is better than broken code I would say.

No. A *working*compiler* is better than broken code.

There's no way to use volatile for these things, since it can hit
*anything*. When the compiler generates buggy code, it's buggy code. We
can't add volatiles to every single data structure. We'd be better off
having a million monkeys on crack try to hand-assemble the thing, than
having a totally buggy compiler do it for us.

Linus