&gt; We complain that compiler technology is not keeping pace<p>Who was complaining about that?<p>&gt; when they put in god knows how many hundreds of hours of work improving, we complain when we might have to spend a few to go back through our programs and make sure everything&#x27;s okay. We want everyone else to do the work for us.<p>Their whole job is to compile our programs - what else is a compiler good for? I don&#x27;t know who GCC&#x27;s users are these days - people who care more about benchmarks than working code? Because that seems to be who they&#x27;re optimising for. Then again I suppose that&#x27;s the entirety of C&#x2F;C++&#x27;s market these days.