I love compilers! I cannot code without them. They can prevent entire classes of errors and warns if I accidentally try to do something stupid in the code.

Warnings

Besides compiling code and checking for type and syntax errors, compilers can also print useful warnings. I’m a fan of turning on all warnings and writing a “paranoidly” safe code just to avoid potential correctness and performance problems. While coding in C/C++, I use to use gcc with flag -Wall. But did you know that it doesn’t enable all warning as the name suggests?

Extra warnings

Some people know that there is an extra flag -Wextra and few of them also know that there is one more -Wpedantic. But even those 3 flags -Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic will not turn on all of the possible warnings in gcc.

To turn on all warnings you have to use the following 14 switches:

-Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic -Wzero-as-null-pointer-constant \
    -Wcomment -Wdouble-promotion -Wfloat-conversion -Wfloat-equal \
    -Wformat-nonliteral -Wformat-security -Wformat-signedness \
    -Wmissing-declarations -Wshadow -Wswitch-default

Happy coding!

Article by Tomasz Kuczma

Software engineer with a passion. Interested in computer networks and large-scale distributed computing. He loves to optimize and simplify software on various levels of abstraction starting from memory ordering through non-blocking algorithms up to system design and end-user experience. Geek. Linux user.

The views I express are my alone and they do not necessarily express the views of my employer or ex-employers. They are not investment advice nor based on any non-public information of any kind. Poglądy, które wyrażam, są tylko moje i niekoniecznie wyrażają opinie mojego pracodawcy lub byłych pracodawców. Nie są poradami inwestycyjnymi ani nie opierają się na jakichkolwiek niepublicznych informacjach.