> On May 10, 2023, at 10:39 AM, Eli Zaretskii via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>
>> ...
>> Sweeping problems under the carpet and hoping no one trips over the
>> bumps is, at best, pushing problems down the road for future developers.
>
> I'm not sweeping anything. This is not GCC's problem to solve, that's
> all. If the developer avoids dealing with this problem, then he or
> she might be sweeping the problem under the carpet. But this is not
> GCC's problem.
Agreed. -Wall -Werror exists for a reason, and choosing to use that it helpful
but not necessarily feasible for everyone if confronted with old mouldy code.
I remember a wonderful article (out of MIT?) explaining a whole bunch of
somewhat-surprising C standard rules and why they allowed the compiler to do
things that many people don't expect. As I recall, a lot of those were things
that Linux didn't want and therefore would suppress with suitable -f<mumble>
flags. "Strict aliasing" may have been one of those -- I still remember my
somewhat-surprised reaction when I first learned what that is and why my
"obvious" C code was not valid.
I also agree with Eli that using C to write highly reliable code is, shall we
say, quite a challenge. The language just isn't well suited for that. But GCC
also supports Ada.... :-) and now Modula-2.
paul
