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From: Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: does char *str="abcd"; alloc addressable memory?
Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2020 08:54:52 -0700
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John Forkosh <forkosh@panix.com> writes:

> Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com> writes:
>> [...]
>>
>>> Much more recently than that, gcc had an option -fwriteable-strings.
>>> That option has since been removed, but it was still available in
>>> the last ten years or so.
>>
>> The "-fwritable-strings" option (note spelling), was removed in 2004.
>> The version string for the commit that removed it was
>> "3.5.0 20040223 (experimental)".
>
> Just curious at this point (since you and TimR and BenB already
> elegantly solved my actual problem upthread), but why would the
> behavior be removed at all?  [...]

My guess is it was a simple cost/benefits analysis.  Here is
a compiler (not language!) feature that is of dubious utility,
probably not used very much, and requiring further investment
of effort to support for new OS releases, changes to object
file formats, etc.  It isn't surprising that gcc developers
might decide their efforts were better spent elsewhere - just
yank the thing and be done with it, especially since there
are easy and obvious workarounds, and even easier given that
support for compound literals in C99 had been around for five
years at that point.