The realm of free compilers

Two of the three major compilers today are developed and maintained in an open-source manner. This means that, in theory, anyone can contribute and provide useful new features to their compiler of choice. However, in practice, it means that there is a tiny core of professional programmers who have the necessary knowledge and dedication, and also the backing of a large corporation benefiting from the development of the aforementioned compiler working on it.

In no particular order, GCC and Clang (and MSVC, which we discussed in the previous section) are the most standard-compliant compilers as of 2024. This standard compliance, however, does not mean that these compilers don’t come with their own perks that a developer once thought would be a great idea to incorporate.

Let’s take, for example, the computed goto feature of GCC (and Clang too, of course; those two tend to go hand in hand). We all have learned in school that goto is just plain...