[declanhaigh]

Ken Thompson once made a similar point about compilers and trust but in terms of security:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

[mrweasel]

Adding to the security part, there are also situations where compilers will optimize something, only to introduce security issues, hence the need to functions such as explicit_bzero (https://man.openbsd.org/explicit_bzero).

[pests]

Half of Linus rants are just about compiler bugs .