GCC 4.1 Status Report (2005-08-21)

[Mark Mitchell]

Andrew Pinski wrote:
> 
> On Aug 22, 2005, at 1:27 AM, Mark Mitchell wrote:
> 
>> (Quite a few of the diagnostic messages
>> stem from the design decision to issue warnings from the
>> optimizers...)
> 
> 
> Only 8 out of 49 at that, though some are very minor as two are just
> complaining wording of the warning.

It was a little snarky of me to throw that in there; I do realize this 
is considered a settled issue.  As you know, it's a pet peeve of mine. 
I still think that until we give up on this approach we're going to see 
strange warning behavior; the price of our quest for better accuracy 
will be less predictability and less consistency from release to release.

> And almost all are uninitialized warnings which are always questionable as there is no way to warn from
> the front-end without flow control.

Most compilers use very simplistic methods for doing these warnings, in 
their front ends.  They still use control flow, but in much simpler 
ways.  The accuracy of the warnings is therefore less than in GCC (in 
that, generally, other compilers warn less often than GCC, and therefore 
detect fewer problems), but the number of false positives is generally 
nearly zero.

Though I don't agree, it's certainly true that the consensus has been to 
try for greater accuracy, by using the optimizers.  I'm not trying to 
upset the apple cart; I was just throwing in a little barb.

> to the next.  If we don't care about diagnostic bugs (which we really 
> should
> but it seems like we don't), then can we just remove the target milestones
> for all of those too.

No, we should not do that.  As you say, we should be trying to fix them. 
  Though, naturally, they're less important, all things equal, to 
wrong-code, rejects-valid, or ice-on-valid bugs.

-- 
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
mark@codesourcery.com
(916) 791-8304