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Comment by dataflow | Hacker News Reader

The issue is that not every snapshot of a source file is intended to be committed as-is.

So it really depends if you're testing code or committing it. When you're debugging something locally, warnings like "unused parameter" or "dead code" become extremely annoying as errors. I need to be able to put "return 0;" in the middle of my function and run it as-is without having to battle the toolchain for five minutes after that every damn time.

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Of course i don't have the specifics of your usual configuration. But usually this mostly a configuration problem. Dev builds usually don't have -Werror turned on ( or have a very easy way to turn Werror off). In most project i worked on, Werror is informance on the release, and continious test builds.

But i do agree that Werror on the code/build/test cycle sound like a pain.

I mean sure, you can work around any problem if you put enough effort into it. For this particular problem, in reality it introduces friction. e.g., one practical problem you face (if you've put sufficient work into your tooling to get to this point) is that your "dev" builds will now miss the cache far more often, because CI is running with different flags. Again, you can work around that... by (for example) spending more money and energy building with different flags. Nothing is impossible to do with enough investment, but these don't come free.

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