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Others | 4 years ago

Is it really sane to have a world of software that can’t survive new compiler or loader warnings? That just seems crazy to me

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tgbugs|4 years ago

There is one school of software engineering which upgrades all warnings to be errors and thus fatal because "warning culture" leads complacency. Thus emitting a new warning as part of default behavior will break builds.

thayne|4 years ago

Yes. But if you do that, then you need to be willing to fix new warnings (or ignore them) when you update dependencies. After all, if an update adds a new warning about something dangerous you are doing in your code, but shouldn't be, wouldn't you like to know about it?

jevoten|4 years ago

Running a red light is dangerous, therefore let's remove red lights..

jbovlaste|4 years ago

Breaking over new warnings seems crazy, but that can be one of the prices of stability. C, Perl, JavaScript and others have similar problems and come to their own solutions.

(For instance, C has warnings under the -W flags and you could enable them all at compile time with -Wall, but then people depended on the specific flags under that option so there's also -Wextra now.)

Stability means sometimes you stay still when there are good reasons to move, though there's always a balance. Perhaps a larger solution is needed (more prevalent version pinning, or an ASDF 4.0), but this may be a tempest in a teapot. We'll see how this particular issue shakes out.

dathinab|4 years ago

> That just seems crazy to me

its crazy, and supper harmful

sadly it's not that rare in e.g. C/C++ as far as I know