Knee-jerk rants aside, there is of course the underlying point that C and C++ have such wide scope for undefined and implementation-defined behavior that no mortal programmer can write a non-trivial C&#x2F;C++ program that follows the standard to the letter.<p>Whether it&#x27;s possible to salvage C&#x2F;C++ by specifying some safe subset (for some ideas towards this see e.g. Regehr&#x27;s &quot;safe C&quot; or DJB&#x27;s &quot;boring C&quot;) without sacrificing too much performance remains to be seen. Another option, then, would be to start over from a clean slate, e.g. Rust.<p>While most likely having less of an impact on the world at large, at least personally I find learning myself Rust more fulfilling than the prospect of fighting political battles in the ISOC committée. YMMV, of course.<p>tl;dr: The above has all to do with the specification of the C and C++ languages rather than compiler writers attempt to exploit the spec to its fullest potential. So yeah, as long as &quot;compiler goodness&quot; is (marketing-wise at least) determined by SPECcpu scores, it&#x27;s unfair to blame compiler writers for this mess.