Why are compilers so stupid?

Question

I always wonder why compilers can\'t figure out simple things that are obvious to the human eye. They do lots of simple optimizations, but never something even a little bit

Answer 1

Compilers that can do strict-aliasing optimizations, will optimize first example out. See here.

Second example can't be optimized because the slowest part here is memory allocation/reallocation and operator+= is redefined into a function that does the memory stuff. Different implementations of strings use different allocation strategies.

I myself also would rather like to have malloc(100000) than thousand malloc(100) too when doing s += "s"; but right now that thing is out of scope of compilers and has to be optimized by people. This is what D language tries to solve by introducing pure functions.

As mentioned here in other answers, perl does second example in less than a second because it allocates more memory than requested just in case more memory will be needed later.