On 7/27/2011 3:50 PM, bearophile wrote:
I'd like all those tests done by the D compiler too (Clang doesn't perform those tests on default because they take time, you have to add the --analyze compiler switch). Some of them like Dead store look better as warnings, other ones seem better as errors.
The signal to noise ratio of this kind of flow analysis is rather poor. While it does find some legitimate bugs, the rate of false positives is far too high to be a standard part of the language.
I would agree that adding extra conditionals to the source code will both eliminate the false positives and make the code more readable, but those extra conditionals exact a performance penalty and would not be something a high performance coder would want.
I originally did have stuff like this in the optimizer, but removed it because the false positive rate was untenable.
