[names_r_hard]

Thanks, and for what it's worth, I didn't downvote you (account is too new to even do so :D ), and I agree with your main point - it's not that hard to avoid all compiler warnings if you do it from the start, and make sure it's highly visible.

You only add one at a time, so you only need to fix one at a time, and you understand what you're trying to do.

It is, however, a real bitch to fix all compiler warnings in decade old code that targets a set of undocumented hardware platforms with which you are unfamiliar. And you just updated the toolchain from gcc 5 to 12.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Oh, don't worry about the downvotes. Happens every time someone starts talking about improving software Quality around here.

Unpopular topic. I talk about it anyway, as it's one of my casus belli. I can afford the dings.

BTW: I used to work for Canon's main [photography] competitor, and Magic Lantern was an example of the kind of thing I wanted them to enable, but they were not particularly open to the idea -control freaks.

Also, it's a bit "nit-picky," I know, but I feel that any software that runs on-device is "firmware," and should be held to the same standards as the OS. I know that Magic Lantern has always been good. We used to hear customers telling us how good it was, and asking us to do similar.

I think RED had something like that, as well. I wonder how that's going?

[names_r_hard]

Okay, good, just making sure :) Fun to hear that at least some photo gear places are aware of ML!

I have done a stint in QA, as well as highly aggressive security testing against a big C codebase, so I too care a lot about quality. And you can do it in C, you just have to put in the effort.

I'd like to get Valgrind or ASAN working with our code, but that's quite a big task on an RTOS. It would be more practical in Qemu, but still a lot of effort. The OS has multiple allocators, and we don't include stdlib.

Re firmware / software, doesn't all software run on a device? So I suppose it depends what you mean by a device. Is a Windows exe on a desktop PC firmware? Is an app from your phones store firmware? We support cams that are much more powerful than low end Android devices. Here the cam OS, which is on flash ROM, brings the hardware up, then loads our code from removable storage, which can even be a spinning rust drive. It feels like they're firmware, and we're software, to me. It's not a clearly defined term.

The main reason I make the distinction is because we get a lot of users who think ML is like a phone rom flash, because that's what firmware is to most people. Thus they assume it's a risky process, and that the Canon menus etc will be gone. But we don't work that way.