Tips from the compiler

[bearophile]

Jonathan M Davis:

> The problem is that there are a lot of things that you can warn about which 
> aren't necessarily a problem, and it can be really annoying to have to fix a 
> bunch of useless warnings. If it really matters, then it should be an error. And 
> if it doesn't really matter, then do we need to warn about?

This is a quite manichaean view of the programming world, but life isn't like that, it comes in shades of grey. I suggest you to read the book "Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic" by Bart Kosko, to help your mind grow up a bit.

And sometimes even when the situation is clear for a human, a less smart compiler may be unsure, so it has to give a probability weighting of the situation. Some lint tools literally partition their messages in classes based on their truth probability.

And then, keep in mind I was not talking about warnings in this post, but more about compiler tips. A performance tip, even when it's 100% certain, is not something you must listen to. It may be useful if you are performance-tuning a function, otherwise you may ignore it. This is why I have said they are a third kind of compiler message.


> I'm not entirely against warnings, but I do think that there are a lot of things 
> that keep getting proposed as warnings (particularly by Bearophile) which are 
> far more likely to be annoying to fix non-problems than to actually be a problem 
> and that such warnings would be far better suited to a lint-like tool than the 
> compiler.

There are two things to say about lint tools:
- They are really really useful if you write C code. And I think they may be useful for D code too.
- Lot of people aren't using them. I know older programmers that didn't even know what a lint is. In my opinion one way to avoid this is to put some lint-capabilities inside the compiler.

Putting a whole lint inside the compiler is probably not a good idea, because they a good lint is complex. So I think it's a good thing to put some simple lint functionality inside the dmd compiler. In Bugzilla I have added some enhancement requests about this, that have received many comments from people.

Bye,
bearophile