Tips from the compiler

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday 17 October 2010 19:40:36 bearophile wrote:
> In Bugzilla I have some compiler messages that don't fit in the set of
> error messages nor in the set of normal warnings. Like:
> http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5056
> 
> So I have proposed a third kind of compiler message, that are
> tips/suggestions to avoid possible bugs, improve the shape or performance
> of the code, and so on. The compiler shows those tips only on request.
> 
> My usage of C lints has shown me that such tips sometimes are very useful
> to avoid coding pitfalls, etc.
> 
> Here you may see some simple example of compiler tips from the CommonLips,
> that the compiler shows only when the higher optimization levels are used:
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/program.php?test=mandelbrot&lang=sbc
> l&id=1
> 
> Bye,
> bearophile

I think that what we should really look at doing is to have either dmd or some 
other tool built on dmd's front-end be able to do lint-like examination of 
source code (if it were dmd itself rather than an external tool, it would be a 
flag which presumably did that only rather than compile your code). That way, all 
of the various warning and error messages that you and others keep coming up 
with but will never end up in dmd can be put in there. That tool could provide a 
way to find all of the weird, stray cases that could result in errors, and anyone 
who wants to examine their code on that level could use it. Then we wouldn't 
have all of these potential warnings sitting around which Walter will never put 
into dmd.

And honestly, I think that things like dangling else, unused variables, and 
redundant code make a lot more sense it a tool that is looking for potential 
programming errors rather than the compiler. It's the compiler's job to 
correctly generate the code that it's given, not worry about all of the possible 
ways that the programmer could have screwed up when they wrote the code.

- Jonathan M Davis