Re: Is it time to take the middle-end stringop/array warnings out of -Wall?

Project / Subsystem

gcc / gcc

Date

2026-05-21

Proposer

Martin Uecker <muecker@gwdg.de>

Source type

public_inbox

Consensus

Proposed

Sentiment

/10

Technical tradeoffs

  • More aggressive warnings may lead to more false positives, requiring developers to spend time investigating non-issues.
  • Adding new warning categories requires development effort and may increase the complexity of GCC's warning system.

All attributes

project
gcc
subsystem
gcc
patch_id
discussion_id
06843749fe753b34a5161dd71d7436615944d135.camel@gwdg.de
source_type
public_inbox
title
Re: Is it time to take the middle-end stringop/array warnings out of -Wall?
headline
Is it time to take middle-end stringop/array warnings out of -Wall?
tldr
Martin suggests new warning categories for memory-safety issues with aggressive warnings for potential safety problems.
proposer
Martin Uecker <muecker@gwdg.de>
consensus
Proposed
outcome
proposed
sentiment_score
technical_tradeoffs
  • More aggressive warnings may lead to more false positives, requiring developers to spend time investigating non-issues.
  • Adding new warning categories requires development effort and may increase the complexity of GCC's warning system.
series_id
6C8E18B9-B946-4358-94A3-2979A435417C@gmail.com
series_role
reply
series_parts
[]
tags
  • gcc
  • warnings
  • memory-safety
  • false positives
bugzilla_url
date
2026-05-21T00:00:00.000Z

Re: Is it time to take the middle-end stringop/array warnings out of -Wall?

Martin Uecker suggests creating new warning categories related to memory-safety issues. These categories would have aggressive warnings, even for potential safety problems. This could include warnings about unsafe casts or pointer arithmetic. He acknowledges the desire to reduce false positives.