I think this is an interesting case study in how it’s difficult to anticipate the needs of the future and not over-engineer a protocol at the same time.

There’s also this part of the standard that throws a wrench into this hypothesis:

§5.1.2.3/4: (Program execution, Observable behavior):

Accesses to volatile objects and calls to library I/O functions are observable behavior. The implementation may perform any transformation of a program, provided that the resulting program’s observable behavior is not changed.

So it seems that running forever isn’t an observable property that must be preserved when code is transformed.

Still, I think compilers try to not surprise the developer too badly and would recognize a trivial loop most of the time.

The lovely part about UB is it’s non-causal. The compiler can go back in time and steal Halloween candy from you when you were five and still comply with the specification.

The compiler (in C) is allowed to assume that infinite loops eventually terminate. This can lead to these kinds of loops not actually running forever when built with an optimizing compiler.

ISO/IEC 9899:2017 §6.8.5 “Iteration statements”, paragraph 6:

“An iteration statement may be assumed by the implementation to terminate if its controlling expression is not a constant expression, and none of the following operations are performed in its body, controlling expression or (in the case of a for statement) its expression-3: – input/output operations – accessing a volatile object – synchronization or atomic operations."

It can, for example, simply optimize it away, assuming non-productive infinite loops are stupid and not reflective of what the code will actually do.

It really is such a cool concept. The autism in me hates the name though because there’s always a server. I wish it were called a “container-based service” or even just “containers” instead of serverless to be more direct. Perhaps even “web functions.”

There’s so much big talk about scale but really, scaling is not that important to 99% of businesses I’ve worked at. You’re not a startup. Your typical server has a huge amount of resources if managed appropriately. I guarantee and would bet money that you’ll never have a million users let alone a billion using your medical coding web app. Like, sit down!

Who knew that removing functionality and limiting access to your product was the path to social media success.