[Haskell-cafe] How far compilers are allowed to go with optimizations?

[Mateusz Kowalczyk]

You don't reason about the bits churned out by a compiler but about the
actual code you write. If you want to preserve such information during
the compilation process, you probably want to run the compiler without
any optimization flags at all.

At the moment, with the way you are thinking about it, you'd have to
reason about every program based on every compiler version it can go
through. What happens instead is that people prove their program correct
and other people prove the compiler correct. What it does behind the
scenes doesn't matter: it's meant to preserve the exact semantics and if
it does extra stuff on top that doesn't change those (like optimisation)
you should be happy as now it will run more efficiently in practice, and
not just on paper.

On 06/02/13 11:45, Jan Stolarek wrote:
> programmer wouldn't be able to reason about space behaviour of a 
> program