1. Arrays ≠ Everything. Please stop with the straw men.
2. "Compiler Advances Double Computing Power Every 50 Years, And The Interval Keeps Growing". (i.e. even Probsting was wildly optimistic when it comes to the benefits of compiler research). The benefits of these shenanigans are much less than even the critics thought, never mind what the advocates claim. They are actually small and shrinking.
It means ignoring the situation and emitting the code that the programmer wrote. The programmer did not write "put this array in registers". The programmer did write "access element 6 of this array".
This isn't hard.
"Keep the spirit of C. The Committee kept as a major goal to preserve the traditional spirit of C. There are many facets of the spirit of C, but the essence is a community sentiment of the underlying principles upon which the C language is based. Some of the facets of the spirit of C can be summarized in phrases like
- Trust the programmer.
- Don't prevent the programmer from doing what needs to be done.
- Keep the language small and simple.
- Provide only one way to do an operation.
- Make it fast, even if it is not guaranteed to be portable.
The last proverb needs a little explanation. The potential for efficient code generation is one of the most important strengths of C. To help ensure that no code explosion occurs for what appears to be a very simple operation, many operations are defined to be how the target machine's hardware does it rather than by a general abstract rule."
> calling scalar replacement of aggregates a weird optimization is very strange.
No it's not, certainly for arrays. It's a little less weird for structs than it is for arrays. But the fact that you consider calling it weird "very strange" is telling, and to me the heart of this disconnect.
The Optimiser-über-alles community feels that the needs of the optimiser far outweigh the explicit instructions of the programmer. Many programmers beg to differ.
At this point it is obvious that you wouldn't accept anything except a trivial translation to ASM. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to want, but you'll also understand that's not what 99.99% of C and C++ programmers want; even assuming (but not conceding) that might have been the original intent of the language, 50 year later user expectations have changed and there is no reason compilers authors should be bound by some questionable dogma.
Once again, “incompatible with weird optimizations I want to do” is not close to the same thing as “not possible”.
If the two are incompatible, it is obviously the weird optimization that has to go.
How do you pass the address of that array to another function?