Comment by jerf

"you have to GUARANTEE it (or fail compilation)"

I've often pondered the utility of similar flags for other optimizations. This is perhaps the largest one, but there are other situations in certain code where I want to know that my optimization has failed.

A more complicated example is, I've sometimes wanted an assertion that a given function is inlined. We know from hard, repeated experience over decades that letting users annotate functions as inline directly doesn't end up working very well, but I've often wondered about creating an assertion that would fail the compile if it isn't. (Ideally with at least a hint as to why the compiler failed it out, but that's easier said than done.) Obviously you don't want to go slapping this in some major open source library that's going to be compiled by half-a-dozen compilers on dozens of operating systems, but for my own code in my own situation it can be an optimization that is the difference between success and failure and it'd be nice to flag a failure.

(Bear in mind I am not proposing to blindly take any particular action if it triggers. The point is to bring it up to human attention and not have it buried deep in invisible, yet potentially consequential, compiler decisions. The human deciding "I guess this optimization isn't happening" and removing the annotation would be one valid decision, for instance.)