Re: Making _Noreturn a no-op in < Clang 16?

[Paul Eggert]

On 1/19/23 12:44, Sam James wrote:
> _Noreturn is pretty much just an optimisation (and I'm not convinced 
> that it's _needed_  in a lot of cases, rather just a useful hint).

_Noreturn is not just an optimization: it's also useful for static 
checking. For example:

  int
  f (int x)
  {
     if (x < INT_MAX)
       return x + 1;
     error (1, 0, "x is too large");
  }

Since error is _Noreturn the compiler knows not to warn that F might 
return garbage. It's useful to suppress false alarms, even when Clang is 
the compiler.

> Is there any precedent wrt
> handling miscompilations for actively supported compilers in gnulib 
and such?

We've run into them before; I don't know of a list of instances. 
Generally speaking if the workaround is easy and harmless we can install 
it, otherwise we tell users to get a working compiler.