> Otherwise it would imply large companies (Google-scale) experience thousands of compiler bugs per year...
This seems likely to be true, from my experience.
Fortunately, most compiler bugs I run into (mostly with gcc and llvm) are not code generation bugs (which can eat months of debugging), but just segfaults / rejecting correct code / other broken stuff.
I also suspect most programmers spend most of their time staying more or less on the “straight and narrow”. There’s lots of obscure features in most languages (especially in old languages like C++) that not many programmers use.
These features are much more likely to have buggy edge cases in the compiler. And only a small select group of programmers will run into those bugs over and over again.
Eg complex template metaprogramming - which had known broken corner cases in all C++ compilers up until a decade or so ago.
This seems likely to be true, from my experience.
Fortunately, most compiler bugs I run into (mostly with gcc and llvm) are not code generation bugs (which can eat months of debugging), but just segfaults / rejecting correct code / other broken stuff.