Re: [boost] Official warnings policy?

Subject: Re: [boost] Official warnings policy?
From: Emil Dotchevski (emildotchevski_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-11-04 14:14:42

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Zachary Turner <divisortheory_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 12:29 PM, Emil Dotchevski
> <emildotchevski_at_[hidden]>wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 10:03 AM, Mateusz Loskot <mateusz_at_[hidden]>
>> wrote:
>> > John Maddock wrote:
>> > By the way, building Boost gives large number of warnings related to
>> > strict aliasing.
>>
>> As long as these warnings report actual violation of the C++ standard
>> (as opposed to warning about a potential for violation) they should be
>> fixed IMO.
>
> I'm not sure I agree.  If something is a violation of the C++ standard the
> compiler shouldn't be reporting it as an error in the first place.  For
> example, implicit conversion between numeric types losing precision is going
> to issue a warning on MSVC (not sure about GCC) but there's no violation of
> the standard anywhere.  Perhaps this is what you meant and I'm just taking
> what you said too literally.

My comment was specifically about strict aliasing warnings. I meant
that if the compiler warns that reinterpret_cast is dangerous and
tricky, that's not news to me. :)

For example, a reinterpret_cast of a pointer may result in breaking
strict aliasing rules only if the resulting pointee type is
sufficiently different (strict aliasing rules define a few exceptions)
and only if the target pointer is actually dereferenced. At this point
there is a violation of the standard and the warning should be fixed:
another compiler could issue an error instead (at least in theory, in
practice strict aliasing rules are broken quite often in C.)

Emil Dotchevski
Reverge Studios, Inc.
http://www.revergestudios.com/reblog/index.php?n=ReCode