Is this how the + operator is implemented in C?

Question

When understanding how primitive operators such as +, -, * and / are implemented in C, I found the following snippet from an

Answer 1

My question is: Is the + operator implemented as the code posted on MOST implementations?

Let's answer the actual question. All operators are implemented by the compiler as some internal data structure that eventually gets translated into code after some transformations. You can't say what code will be generated by a single addition because almost no real world compiler generates code for individual statements.

The compiler is free to generate any code as long as it behaves as if the actual operations were performed according to the standard. But what actually happens can be something completely different.

A simple example:

static int
foo(int a, int b)
{
    return a + b;
}
[...]
    int a = foo(1, 17);
    int b = foo(x, x);
    some_other_function(a, b);

There's no need to generate any addition instructions here. It's perfectly legal for the compiler to translate this into:

some_other_function(18, x * 2);

Or maybe the compiler notices that you call the function foo a few times in a row and that it is a simple arithmetic and it will generate vector instructions for it. Or that the result of the addition is used for array indexing later and the lea instruction will be used.

You simply can't talk about how an operator is implemented because it is almost never used alone.