> It did not compile what the code said,

Yes, it did--that seems to be your fundamental confusion.

What that code means is determined by the specification of the C language, and only the specification of the C language. You constantly keep implying stuff that you think, or hope, or would prefer the code means, but that is completely irrelevant for the question of what the code actually means. Just because some intuitive reading of the characters that make up the code makes you assume that it should means a certain thing, does not make it so.

That code does not mean "check for overflow", no matter how much you wish it did. And because it doesn't mean that, the compiler didn't translate it as that either.

> No, they don't. If they did, Java, Rust and just about every dynamic language would never do bounds checks. One of the main reasons for a type system is to force the programmer to follow rules to prevent mistakes.

You are completely missing the point, essentially due to the same confusion as above. I didn't say that those languages didn't have bounds checks. I said that they assume that the programmer is infallible. Every programming language specifies exactly what each syntactic construct means, and which syntactic constructs don't mean anything, and what the runtime behaviour is, and where it is undefined. That is what makes a programming language a programming language. It is the job of the programmer to translate what they mean into the syntax of the respective programming language. If the programmer makes a mistake in this translation, the programm will be wrong, and it will not do what the programmer meant it to do, no matter which programming language they are using--in that sense, every programming language expects the programmer to be infallible.

The difference between programming languages is not whether they allow you to make mistake (none does or ever will), but how difficult it is (mentally) to avoid making mistakes.

> I gave a specific example for how to get the same performance if this particular type of optimization was made more conservative. Performance is important, but when it comes to performance or correctness, correctness should win. Full stop.

That's completely besides the point. Nobody is saying we should have incorrect code (well, ok, some misguided people probably do, but they aren't really part of this discussion). The question is how we are going to achieve that, and that is ultimately a question of economics: What is the easiest/cheapest way to get the greatest amount of software into a state where its execution matches what the programmer intended? Just claiming that we should throw infinite resources at the problem doesn't actually help the problem disappear.

> Can you clarify on whether you think the bug report is wrong, or whether I'm incorrect in my assessment of what the bug report is saying, or whether I'm misinterpreting your point?

Really none of those, I think. I think the way you think about the problem is just confused, which makes it difficult to nail down why exactly your suggested solutions aren't really solutions.

> I'm under the impression that much of what I'm stating is fact, so I'm not sure how to interpret statements such as "It compiled exactly what the code said." as anything but wrong, but that's not getting us anywhere.

I hope I maybe managed to explain that above? I think that's really at the core of your confusion: You are mixing up what you intuitively think things mean and what things mean according to the appropriate formal definition in the respective context. But code in particular does not mean anything, except for what the formal specification of the respective language defines, and that can deviate arbitrarily far from your intuitive understanding.

It's a bit like false friends in natural languages: Just because you know a word from one language, doesn't mean the same word cannot mean something completely different in another language, and it's just confused to use the vocabulary of one language to determine the meaning of a sentence in a different lanugage.