This is #24 at work. The trace macro uses try/catch and potentially clobbers the variables that it is testing. GCC actually warns about this if you compile with warnings at a higher optimization level than -O0. This occurs 33 times across the library. It was fairly trivial to mark the variables declared in unit tests within the library as volatile (see db1aa2b), but this framework is public (though undocumented), so if a user wanted to write unit tests using it, they would run into this same issue. This also means that removing exceptions from the library would also mean removing the unit tests.