The boy is smoking and leaving smoke rings into the air.
The girl gets irritated with the smoke and says to her lover: “Can’t you see the warning written on the cigarettes packet, smoking is injurious to health!”
The boy replies back: “Darling, I am a programmer. We don’t worry about warnings, we only worry about errors.”
Many developers tend to give little attention to writing code that generates no warnings at compile time, thinking that since there are no errors, it’s all good.
However, if the compiler issues a warning, there is a good chance that there really is a not-so-obvious problem hidden in the code. If you dig deeper, you might find issues like 32-bit pointers used on 64-bit architectures, comparisons between signed and unsigned variables, and others alike.
What is more, these real problems will be obscured by the tens of “not important” warnings, and you will most probably miss them.
“Unimportant” warnings
If you come to think about it, why do you get these “unimportant” warnings?
Usually it’s because you forget about a declared variable which you no longer use, leave function parameters unhandled, and so on. Problem is – why live with them? In fact, they only scream to you “Clean the code!!!”. Why wouldn’t you delete a parameter that you’re not using, or why would you keep an unused variable?
#pragma warning(disable …)
You may be tempted to easily prevent the warnings to annoy you by simply disabling them. Well, this “ostrich” approach is one of the worst practices that you might do as a developer.
There is one exception though, specifically when you are using 3rd party modules which are poorly coded and thus generate warnings at compile time. In that case, you really have no fault, there is nothing you can do about them, and it might be a good idea to disable them. Good news is, that you can disable the warnings only for the included header file, by wrapping it with a #pragma warning(push) / #pragma warning(pop) construction:
#pragma warning(push) // disable warnings for this header only
#pragma warning(disable:4213)
#include “header_with_warnings.h”
#pragma warning(pop)
The Bottom Line
Do not treat compiler warnings superficially. Use your compiler at its highest warning level and, if there are warnings that appear when you compile your code, understand them and eliminate them by fixing the code, rather than by disabling them.
Title picture © Les Cunliffe | Dreamstime.com
