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Definitely nice to have tools (compiler warnings, static analyzers) that can keep you from hurting yourself.

Of course many projects don’t use them, for various reasons.

I wonder: is turning on full compiler warnings, then fixing them - is it making my software better, or just satisfying some type of neuroticism?




There are stupid warnings about nothing to fix, at least in gcc. It's not making the software better.

One warning I recently disabled on $workproject is -Wtrigraphs.


Trigraphs can readily be formed unintentionally, so having a warning when they change the meaning of the program seems valuable. There is a good reason they were removed entirely in C++17.


They are as good as removed from C.

No compiler I care about has had them enabled by default in more than two decades.


It's not neurosis if it has a useful purpose.


Is it useful if it makes no difference to the user?


Maybe it will make a big difference once the software is way into its useful life, and it needs to be maintained and evolved.




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