On Saturday, 3 May 2014 at 01:17:36 UTC, Jonathan M Davis via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
The problem that some of what gets warned about is _not_
actually a problem.
If it always were, it would be an error. So, unless you have
control over
exactly what gets warned about and have the ability to disable
the warning
in circumstances where it's wrong, it makes no sense to have
the warnings,
because you're forced to treat them as errors and always "fix"
them, even if
the fix is unnecessary. If the compiler provides that kind of
control, then
fine, it can have warnings, but dmd doesn't and won't, because
Walter doesn't
want it to have a vast assortment of flags to control anything
(warnings
included). That being the case, it makes no sense to put the
warnings in the
compiler. With a lint tool however, you can configure it
however you want
(especially because there isn't necessarily one, official tool,
making it
possible to have a lint tool that does exactly what you want
for your
project). It's not tied to what the language itself requires,
making it much
more sane as a tool for giving warnings. The compiler tends to
have to do
what fits _everyone's_ use case, and that just doesn't work for
warnings.
Putting warnings in the compiler always seems to result in
forcing people to
change their code to make the compiler shut up about something
that is
perfectly fine.
- Jonathan M Davis
I'm not arguing for warnings in the compiler. If we agree that a
linter is a good thing that everyone should use, then we should
make it as easy as possible to use it - including having it on by
default. It's fine if it's customizable, disable-able, etc. Then
the users that want to tweak its behaviour or go without can do
so.
As for what "having it on by default" means, that's up for
debate. Currently, only the determined can use, for example,
DScanner, as they have to clone the Github repo, compile it, and
then set it up to use with their editor of choice. DScanner
hasn't become a de-facto standard yet, or "officially blessed",
of course, but as soon as that happens, rapid action needs to be
taken to ensure that it is as painless as possible to use and
enabled by default, preferably transparent to the casual or
uninformed user.
