Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

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A lot of developers I've worked with don't want to use these tools because they are working with already-awful legacy codebases that will emit screenfuls of (legit) positives when run, and it feels overwhelming. I remember working on some teams where all compiler warnings were turned off because if you turned on even the default ones, you'd get hundreds of thousands of them during the build, and it looked bad. Since nobody had the budget to spend any time cleaning up warnings because "customers don't care about compiler warnings" they would never get fixed. Forget even sanitizers: You wouldn't even get the splash screen displayed before ASAN would barf on you.

The best projects are the ones that start out from day 1 with all the pedantic warnings turned on, warnings-as-errors, static analysis and sanitizers run as part of the automated build and any peep out of them gets treated just like an error would get treated. When you start the project out that way, there isn't that de-motivating initial hump to get over.

Kind of opposite mindset here.

Current codebase generates around 3000 casting errors. I doubt I'm the only one with this kind of "history" to deal with AND the application is crashing with memory access errors.

What's my cleanup plan for this? Multiple compilers with every warning enabled on multiple platforms. Even a platform we're not targeting. We've mapped out which files and which lines have the biggest code smell. Now we have a giant map on a 65" tv to guide us.

Why all this attention? We're moving this nightmare from 32 to 64 bits. Parts of it were originally 16bit which have already been updated. Cast errors alone are now signposts to other bad code.

> Why all this attention? We're moving this nightmare from 32 to 64 bits

It helps that you then almost certainly have buy-in and are allowed to treat this as a priority because it's tied to work that the business is willing to prioritize. You're already over the hurdle of "customers don't pay to fix compiler warnings".

Can't debug anything with a soup of warnings and other mess in the way. They either clear the rot or start from scratch. Our estimate is two years devel to get back to now. So, no time to restart.

Getting rid of the warnings and more importantly the related other debris means being able to use enhancements we make each week. Well... after qa/test have done their thing.

Been good practice for my own indie dev. Treat every warning as an error and make a habit of running a detailed reporting build each day or week. The trick of using other platforms and compilers I brought from years back.

Been there done that. One great feature I ran across was that the intel compiler has a #pragma incantation that enables many checks on a per-file basis. This lets you create new code and selectively fix old code without these obvious defects.

So does gcc: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Diagnostic-Pragmas.html

(TIL - thanks!)

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