Is it time to take the middle-end stringop/array warnings out of -Wall?
Richard Biener agrees it may be time to move middle-end stringop/array warnings out of -Wall.
Martin Uecker finds middle-end stringop/array warnings useful in C, and observes that some new languages are stricter and fail hard for false positives. Richard Biener agrees that moving the warnings out of -Wall seems like a reasonable intermediate step. The discussion considers whether these warnings, which can have a high false positive rate, should remain in the default warning set.
- proposer
Agrees that moving the warnings out of -Wall seems like a reasonable intermediate step.
“It seems to be a reasonable, if intermediate step.”
In Details
The middle-end of GCC performs optimizations and transformations on the program's intermediate representation (IR). Stringop/array warnings detect potential buffer overflows or out-of-bounds accesses during these optimizations. The -Wall flag enables a set of commonly used warnings.
For Context
GCC is a compiler that translates human-readable code into machine code. During compilation, GCC performs various checks and optimizations. -Wall is a compiler flag that enables a set of useful warnings. This thread discusses whether certain warnings related to string and array operations, which may produce false positives, should be enabled by default.