On Wednesday, 3 February 2016 at 12:12:03 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
Immutability provides stronger guarantee that allows more optimizations, e.g. reading the same immutable value is known to result in the same value so such repeated reading can be optimized out, in C such optimization is illegal, because const data can change over time.
In C, you can only make pointers to const data a const pointer. The guarantee is built in there. Sure you can cast the address of a const to a regular pointer but then you are kind of going out of your way to break the rules and deliberately shoot yourself in the foot. I'm pretty sure casting away a const pointer to a const value is undefined behaviour.
