> I've personally reported 17 bugs in GCC over the last 2 years
You are an extreme outlier. I know about two dozen people who work with C(++) and not a single one of them has ever told me that they've found a compiler bug when we've talked about coding and debugging - it's been exclusively them describing PEBCAK.
I've been using c++ for over 30 years. 20-30 years ago I was mostly using MSVC (including version 6), and it absolutely had bugs, sometimes in handling the language spec correctly and sometimes regarding code generation.
Today, I use gcc and clang. I would say that compiler bugs are not common in released versions of those (i.e. not alpha or beta), but they do still occur. Although I will say I don't recall the last time I came across a code generation bug.
I knew one person reporting gcc bugs, and iirc those were all niche scenarios where it generated slightly suboptimal machine code but not otherwise observable from behavior
Right - I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, but that it's highly unusual for the majority of C(++) developers, and that some bugs are "just" suboptimal code generation (as opposed to functional correctness, which the GP was arguing).
You are an extreme outlier. I know about two dozen people who work with C(++) and not a single one of them has ever told me that they've found a compiler bug when we've talked about coding and debugging - it's been exclusively them describing PEBCAK.