It Is Never a Compiler Bug Until It Is
I've encountered one genuine compiler bug in my (now 14+ year) career.<p>I was working on a defense contract, on a government system, where I was constrained by local IA policy to specific versions of various tools, including a relatively ancient version of gcc.<p>I can't recall exactly what the problem was, but I do remember figuring out after doing some research that the bug that was biting me had been identified and fixed in a later version of gcc.  Which I was not allowed to install.  So I had to implement a hack-tastic workaround anyway.<p>One of the best parts about that job - I was integrating the tool I was writing (in Python with Tk - it was the only installed and approved GUI library I could use) with a really old signal analysis library that had originally been written for VMS back in the day - then ported to SPARC/Solaris - then ported again to x86 (yes, VMS heritage was evident in places).  Through many years of flowing through many different maintenance contractors, the library had become a giant amalgamation of Ye Olde FORTRAN, C, C++, and Python.  To build it I needed a specific version of the Intel FORTRAN compiler, which my employer would not purchase, and the client IA policy would not allow on their system anyway.  With much hackery, I managed to coax the damn thing into building using the "approved" gfortran that was already on the network.<p>Egad, what a horrible job that was.