I tend to treat warnings as errors. (Even set up my IDE to do so).
In the short run it maybe is annoying but in the long run it really pays off. (Have been burned by a huge pile of crap code base with hundreds of warnings + 64bit transition).
In the short run it maybe is annoying but in the long run it really pays off. (Have been burned by a huge pile of crap code base with hundreds of warnings + 64bit transition).
Won't stop lazy people from ignoring them but that says more about them than the compiler. ;)
Me: Hey, that code generates 3 compiler warnings, and you shouldn't be casting that pointer here.
Them: Oh, ok, whatever, change it if you want.
Me: It's not about what I want.. the code isn't correct. It'll break on some 64-bit platforms, for instance.
Them: Well, it works on our target platform, and that's the one in the spec. If the spec changes, we fix it as a change request.
Me: But it just happens to work! Even a different compiler could result in different behavior. Can't we just put in a little effort up front to avoid trouble later?
Them: Go for it if it bothers you so much. We have real bugs to fix. Nobody cares about hypothetical problems on systems we don't support and compilers we don't use.
Me: [This is going to drive me to alcoholism]
At least do it the right way round: developer machines build with -Werror, and build PC should build without. (Selective "promotion" to errors is a good idea on top of that.) That way, it's not the end of the world if people check something in that doesn't build cleanly, because they disabled -Werror on their local copy in order to get some debugging done without having to play whack-a-mole as they did so.
(Obviously, they're not supposed to do that. But ideally they wouldn't be doing any debugging in the first place, either. These things happen, and processes should be designed around that.)
Not all warnings are equal, and -Werror doesn't give you any discretion. You probably want to be kept abreast of unused functions, unused variables, unused parameters, int-to-bool casts, truncation of double literals, and so on - but they're poor justifications for stopping the build. You don't need to hold the build to ransom to get it to compile without warnings. All you need to do is take the warnings out.