Under certain, rare conditions, the C++ compiler may optimize loops out of a program. When you examine the compiled assembler, you may note that there are functions that do not contain looping instructions, although the source code contains loop constructs.

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This problem occurs because of a bug in the global optimizer.

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Service pack information

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

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Hotfix information

The English version of this fix has the file attributes (or later) that are listed in the following table. The dates and times for these files are listed in coordinated universal time (UTC). When you view the file information, it is converted to local time. To find the difference between UTC and local time, use the Time Zone tab in the Date and Time tool in Control Panel.

   Date          Version       Size        File name
   -------------------------------------------------
   11-Apr-2002   13.0.9485.0   1,753,088   C2.dll 
   11-Apr-2002   13.0.9485.0   2,105,344   C1xx.dll 
				

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To work around the problem, use a larger data type as the iterator value.

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Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section. This problem was first corrected in Visual Studio .NET 2002 Service Pack 1.

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The following program is an example of the behavior. After you build this sample program by using the default compiler settings for release mode, it prints out Loop only one time.

#include <windows.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <tchar.h>


int __cdecl _tmain (int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
    unsigned char stream, tmp;

    for (stream = 0; stream < 4; stream++)
    {
        tmp = stream;
        fprintf (stderr, "Loop\r\n", (unsigned char)((tmp+4)<<5));
    }
    return 0;
}
				

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