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> and even compiler upgrades are not that painful. …if you do them frequently enough. A problem with OSS code is that it may lie dormant for years, then get p
by Someone 3y ago
> and even compiler upgrades are not that painful.
…if you do them frequently enough.
A problem with OSS code is that it may lie dormant for years, then get picked up by somebody. Even if they try to compile for the same CPU architecture with the same but newer compiler, getting things to compile with -Werror again can be a challenge. Changing architecture (e.g. integers becoming 64 bit, triggering lots of ‘possible truncation’ errors) or compiler makes it harder.
I don’t think there’s a solution for that problem. Bit rot exists, and the longer you ignore it, the more work it is to get rid of it, and not trying to get rid of it is an invitation for having a serious warning getting drowned in harmless ones.
- bluGill 3y agoI maintain 20 million lines of C++ and I don't update my compiler very often. There is some pain on update, but it is small and generally easy to fix. Part of this is I already build with gcc and clang (including clang static analisys), and also run cppcheck. Much of the complaints about upgrading compilers seem to be legacy from gcc 2.x days when they were adding a lot more warnings. Now gcc and clang both do a lot of testing against real world code to see if the warnings are noisy or not before adding them. (either that they are about visual studio or some other compiler I don't use)
- Someone 3y agoGood to know that my knowledge was dated.