Hacker News Reader

Comment by crispweed | Hacker News Reader

One big reason to make compiler warnings fatal (not mentioned here, as far as I can see) is the fact that otherwise, unless you do a full rebuild, you won't see warnings for any source files that don't need to be rebuilt.

View on HN

The other reason is that people are lazy, and soon, you will have thousands of warnings, and as a logical result, people will simply ignore them all.

We use the Warnings plugin and set Jenkins to always do a full build, so we can have a good overview of potential warnings on the various platforms a project is built on.

Not surprisingly, 0 warnings on your dev machine doesn't mean you also have 0 warnings on a production build for another architecture..

That's always something where I think current build systems are failing.

But if you didn't change a file, do you really want to see warnings for it? Wouldn't you rather just see warnings for stuff you changed and see all of the warnings when a full build is done in CI?

I guess the ideal would be the possibility to see both.

Perhaps not build systems, but I think editors that help you keep track of warnings should probably have a list of them per-file and only clear that list when the file actually gets rebuilt

I don't know, I'd rather have that functionality in the build system. The editor should just parse the build system's output and keep the stuff it does to a minimum.

Why not just fix the warnings and be done with it? Seems like far less work to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com