Re: changing "configure" to default to "gcc -g -O2 -fwrapv ..."

[Geert Bosch]

On Dec 31, 2006, at 19:13, Daniel Berlin wrote:
> Note the distinct drop in performance across almost all the benchmarks
> on Dec 30, including popular programs like bzip2 and gzip.
Not so.

To my eyes, the specint 2000 mean went UP by about 1% for the
base -O3 compilation. The peak enabled more unrolling, which
is helped by additional range information provided by absence
of -frwapv.

So, I'd say this run would suggest enabling -fwrapv for
at least -O1 and -O2. Also, note that we never have
focussed on performance with -fwrapv, and it is quite
likely there is quite some improvement possible.

I'd really like using -fwrapv by default for -O, -O[s12].
The benefit of many programs moving from "undefined semantics"
to "implementation-defined semantics, overflow wraps like in
old compilers" far outweighs even an average performance loss
of 2% as seen in specfp.

As undefined execution can result in arbitrary badness,
this is really at odds with the increasing need for many
programs to be secure. Since it is almost impossible to
prove that programs do not have signed integer overflow,
it makes far more sense to define behavior in such cases.
Note that were talking defaults: for not-so-sophisticated
programmers, we should focus on being safe. People smart
enough to proof their program can't cause signed integer
overflow, can certainly figure out compiler options to
disable -fwrapv.

  -Grt