On Thu, 01 May 2014 11:17:09 +0000 Temtaime via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone. > I think it's need to have -w64(or other name, offers ?) flag that > warns if code may not compile on other archs. > > Example: > size_t a; > uint b = a; // ok on 32 without a warning but fail on 64 with > error > > And on 32 with -w64 it'll be : > Warning : size_t.sizeof may be greater than 32 bit > > What you thinks ? > Should i create proposal or nobody cares about porting and it's > useless ? > > Any ideas are welcome. The compiler doesn't even know that size_t exists. It's just an alias in object_.d. So, it could be fairly involved to get the compiler to warn about something like this. And while in some respects, this would be nice to have, I don't think that it's actually a good idea. IMHO, the compiler pretty much has no business warning about anything. As far as the compiler is concerned, everything should be either an error or nothing (and Walter agrees with me on this; IIRC, the only reason that he added warnings in the first place was as an attempt to appease some folks). About the only exception would be deprecation-related warnings, because those are items that aren't currently errors but are going to be errors. If warnings are in the compiler, programmers are forced to fix them as if they were errors (because it's bad practice to leave compiler warnings in your build), and they can actually affect what does and doesn't compile thanks to the -w flag (which can be particularly nasty when stuff like template constraints get involved). Warnings belong in lint-like tools where the user can control what they want to be warned about, including things that would be useful to them but most other folks wouldn't care about. So, unless you're suggesting that we make it an error to assign a value of size_t to a uint, I don't think that it makes any sense for the compiler to say anything about this, and given the fact that it doesn't know anything about size_t anyway, it's probably not particularly reasonable to have the compiler warn about it even if we agreed that it would be a good idea. D is ideally suited to writing lint-like tools, and as I understand it, Brian Schott has written one. I don't know what state it's currently in or what exactly it can warn you about at this point, but I think that it would be better to look at putting warnings like this in such a tool than to try and get it put in the compiler. - Jonathan M Davis
