This is a really interesting look in how much of a pain in the ass adding features to C and C++ is.

This reminds me quite a lot of similarly felt issues in the Linux kernel.

• This is a compiler for the Tiny-C language. Tiny-C is a
• considerably stripped down version of C and it is meant as a
• pedagogical tool for learning about compilers. The integer global
• variables “a” to “z” are predefined and initialized to zero, and it
• is not possible to declare new variables. The compiler reads the
• program from standard input and prints out the value of the
• variables that are not zero.

ACOVEA (Analysis of Compiler Options via Evolutionary Algorithm) implements a genetic algorithm to find the “best” options for compiling programs with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) C and C++ compilers. “Best”, in this context, is defined as those options that produce the fastest executable program from a given source code. Acovea is a C++ framework that can be extended to test other programming languages and non-GCC compilers.