[RFC] GCC caret diagnostics

[Chris Lattner]

On Mar 12, 2008, at 5:07 PM, Manuel López-Ibáñez wrote:

> On 08/03/2008, Chris Lattner <clattner@apple.com> wrote:
>>
>> clang points into the original input buffer that was lexed from.   
>> This
>> requires keeping the original files mapped into the address space of
>> the compiler.  However, clang only produces diagnostics from the  
>> front-
>> end, not from the middle-end.
>
> So no warnings for uninitialized variables?

The clang front-end generates these warnings.  This means that the set  
of warnings produced by the compiler doesn't change as the optimizer  
evolves, are generally less mystifying to the user, and have perfect  
location info as a side effect.  People who use -Werror tend to prefer  
when they don't get new random warnings due to a compiler upgrade.   
This approach is similar to what Java compilers do and frontends like  
EDG do (afaik).

The Clang project is also growing a static analysis engine which is  
very adept at solving path sensitive versions of these problems, which  
is useful for finding deeper bugs.

-Chris