On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 1:06 PM, Patrick Horgan <phorgan1@gmail.com> wrote:
John Maddock wrote:
I'm *not* saying we should do this for 1.41, but should we have an official policy regarding compiler warnings and which ones we regard as "failures"? I realize these can get pretty busy-body at times, but if the user sees several pages of warnings when building Boost it doesn't look so good.
It not only doesn't look good. It isn't good. As Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu point out in Item 1 in C++ Coding Standards which says compile cleanly at high warning levels, if you get used to ignoring warnings, it is guaranteed to bite you in the butt. I know people will talk about silly examples, and how hard it is. Wah wah wah. I find real errors in the code of people like that all the time. They got used to ignoring warnings and real problems got by them. Someone who isn't willing to understand the warnings is asking for trouble, and I know there are people in boost who don't take the trouble to understand their warnings. I see things that are silly, and that they should have fixed. I don't see how they can hold their heads up for some of this stuff.
It isn't helpful to cast the blame generically like that. I don't know how you know that Boost developers don't take the trouble to understand their warnings, but a good start would be to file a specific bug report whenever you suspect that a warning is being erroneously ignored.
Of course, there are silly warnings. Sometimes the problem is with the compiler. But still, make them go away if at all possible, otherwise the noise makes it difficult/impossible to catch the real problems, and all that noise makes you look like a rookie wanna be, not the provider of serious software.
Should I understand that your code compiles on MSVC without disabling C4996? It tends to generate a lot of noise even at low warning levels. Emil Dotchevski Reverge Studios, Inc. http://www.revergestudios.com/reblog/index.php?n=ReCode