Generally, UB is regarded as being something that has to be avoided, and the current C standard itself lists quite a few examples in appendix J.
However, there are c
No, unless you're also keeping your compiler the same and your compiler documentation defines the otherwise undefined behavior.
Undefined behavior means that your compiler can ignore your code for any reason, making things true that you don't think should be.
Sometimes this is for optimization, and sometimes it's because of architecture restrictions like this.
I suggest you read this, which addresses your exact example. An excerpt:
Signed integer overflow:
If arithmetic on an
int
type (for example) overflows, the result is undefined. One example is thatINT_MAX + 1
is not guaranteed to beINT_MIN
. This behavior enables certain classes of optimizations that are important for some code.For example, knowing that
INT_MAX + 1
is undefined allows optimizingX + 1 > X
totrue
. Knowing the multiplication "cannot" overflow (because doing so would be undefined) allows optimizingX * 2 / 2
toX
. While these may seem trivial, these sorts of things are commonly exposed by inlining and macro expansion. A more important optimization that this allows is for<=
loops like this:for (i = 0; i <= N; ++i) { ... }
In this loop, the compiler can assume that the loop will iterate exactly
N + 1
times ifi
is undefined on overflow, which allows a broad range of loop optimizations to kick in. On the other hand, if the variable is defined to wrap around on overflow, then the compiler must assume that the loop is possibly infinite (which happens ifN
isINT_MAX
) - which then disables these important loop optimizations. This particularly affects 64-bit platforms since so much code usesint
as induction variables.