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integer comparision; difference in behavior between Clang and GCC 12

I'm seeing a strange (to me) difference in behavior between Clang and GCC when comparing an integer with its negation. Also, pre-v12 GCC behaves like Clang.

Code is below, but also here's a live link on godbolt.org.

int32_t x = 0x80000000U;
cout << " x: " << x << endl;
cout << "-x: " << -x << endl;
if ( x == -x) {
 cout << "equal" << endl;
} else {
 cout << "NOT equal" << endl;
}

For GCC versions before 12, and for modern Clang, this prints "equal"

For GCC 12+, this prints "NOT equal".

My question is: why?

It does not seem to be a bug, since all GCC versions from 12 on have this behavior. But it is clearly a change from historical behavior.

Is there a reason behind this change? What is actually going on in this code, in the two different cases?

My only guess is that somehow GCC is promoting x to a larger type, since 0x80000000 does not fit in int32_t, and using that for the comparison. But by what logic?

Note: even adding a int32_t(-x) cast inside the comparison does not change the behavior.

Answer*

This self-answer is just to spell things out, for future reference.

First, there is an assignment of a too-large unsigned value to a signed type:

```
int32_t x = 0x80000000U;
```

Before C++20 (see @shananton's comment), that is generally "implementation defined" behavior. Both Clang and GCC (all versions) perform the expected two's-compliment wraparound, here — but that's not guaranteed by the standard, before C++20.

So, `x` gets a value of `-2147483648` (which is `INT_MIN`). You see this in the printout.

Then, the comparison of `x == -x` is made.
But `-x` is undefined, for INT_MIN, since the result will not fit in the signed type.

With undefined behavior, the compiler is free to assume it can never happen. So, in this case, GCC optimizes away the path where they might be equal, since that undefined behavior is "not allowed" to happen.

This behavior can be altered with `-fno-strict-overflow` (which disables such optimizations), or with the even stronger `-fwrapv`, which makes signed integer overflow fully-defined.

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2

Actually, unsigned to signed conversions like this became well-defined in C++20, and are now guaranteed to result in "the unique value of the destination type that is congruent to the source integer modulo 2^N , where N is the width of the destination type" (which is what you would normally expect). This is because, starting from C++20, integers are required to use two's complement for the representation

shananton
– shananton

2025年08月29日 19:55:10 +00:00
Commented Aug 29, 2025 at 19:55
2

Signed overflow due to arithmetic is, of course, still undefined behavior

shananton
– shananton

2025年08月29日 19:55:32 +00:00
Commented Aug 29, 2025 at 19:55
@shananton Ah thanks — I updated it to make note of C++20.

jwd
– jwd

2025年08月30日 20:02:22 +00:00
Commented Aug 30, 2025 at 20:02

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integer comparision; difference in behavior between Clang and GCC 12

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