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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Sounds amazing. Anyone have code examples that integrate a lot of the newer stuff?

Dumb question. Why isn't omitting 'return' always an error in gcc rather than just a warning?

In any case, just add -Werror=return-type to your compiler flags... After I had forgotten a return once, that option saved me several times.

int foo() { bar(); } is a perfectly well-formed function as long as bar() never returns. Allowing this without requiring bar() to be annotated as noreturn is generally considered a mistake, but correcting it would break existing valid programs.

C++17 already made backward compatibility a non-goal (within reason, obviously) and broke previously valid programs.

I don’t care that my previous comment post has been downvoted, but I do want to clarify that I wasn’t being facetious; C++17 removes a number of old features and constructs that had been previously deprecated and there exist programs that compiled under C++14 that need non-trivial changes to compile under C++17.

> but correcting it would break existing valid programs

That's very often the case when enhancing static safety guarantees. And that's often worth it.

Likely answer is, doesn't really cause problems for anyone in practice. Experienced C++ programmers fix warnings.

Also the ABI specifies how to call and get the return value of a function. The long and the short if it is the execution thread doesn't go off the rails if there is a mismatch in expected behavior. Your data may be garbage tho.

It would be nice if the program would abort if a non-void function returns without a value. The only cost would be a slightly larger executable.

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