The Shape of Code

The hardest thing about writing a compiler is getting someone to pay you to do it. Having found somebody to pay you to write, update or maintain a compiler, why would you want to fix fault reported by some unrelated random Joe user?

If Random Joe is customer of a commercial compiler company he can expect a decent response to bug reports, because paying customers are hard to find and companies want to hold onto them.

If Random Joe is a user of an open source compiler, then what incentive does anybody paid to work on the compiler have to do anything about the reported problem?

The most obvious reason is reputation, developers want to feel that they are creating a high quality piece of software. Given that there are not enough resources to spend time investigating all reported problems (many are duplicates or minor issues), it is necessary to prioritize. When reputation is a major factor, the amount of publicity attached to a problem report has a big impact on the priority assigned to that report.

When compiler fuzzers started to attract a lot of attention, a few years ago, the teams working on gcc and llvm were quick to react and fix many of the reported bugs (Csmith is the fuzzer that led the way).

These days finding bugs in compilers using fuzzing is old news and I suspect that the teams working on gcc and llvm don’t need to bother too much about new academic papers claiming that the new XYZ technique or tool finds lots of compiler bugs. In fact I would suggest that compiler developers stop responding to researchers working toward publishing papers on these techniques/tools; responses from compiler maintainers is being becoming a metric for measuring the performance of techniques/tools, so responding just encourages the trolls.

Just because you have been using gcc or llvm since you wore short trousers does not mean they owe you anything. If you find a bug in the compiler and you care, then fix it or donate some money so others can make a living working on these compilers (I don’t have any commercial connection or interest in gcc or llvm). At the very least, don’t complain.