alt Hacker News> My rationale: if you do set warn->error, then there are 2 ways around it: change the code to eliminate the warning, or pacify the compiler. Note, the measure to set it to error, is to instigate lazy programmers to deal with it. If the lazy person is really lazy, then they will deal with it with a pacifier. You won nothing.
> You won nothing.
No, you won that you can distinguish between intended and not intended warnings. Specifying in the code, which warnings are expected makes all warnings that the compiler outputs something you want to get fixed. When you do not do that, than it is easy to miss a new warning or that the warning changed. So you essentially say that you should not distinguish between intended and non-intended warnings?
Having no warnings is a worthwhile goal, but often not possible, since you want to be warned for some things, so you need that warning level, but you don't want to be warned about that in a specific line.
> So you essentially say that you should not distinguish between intended and non-intended warnings?
No, I pretty clearly said the opposite. Please read what I wrote:
"[...] is not a problem to document them clearly. Developers building the project should be informed anyway of many other things"
I also stated "warnings, you should have as few as possible, if any at all" in the projects I worked we hardly had any in the final delivery, but we had many in-between, which I find ok. If there are only 2 warnings, I do not see a big risk of not seeing a 3rd. I expect developers to look the compiler output, carefully, as if it was a review from a coworker.
Last but not least you ignore my last paragraph, where I say warnings are typically technical debt. There should be in the long run no "expected" warnings. My whole point is that they are just no error, so you should allow the program to compile and keep working in other things. I do not think is ok to have warnings. Also (specially) I think is a bad idea to silence the compiler.
Anyway, a good compiler will end with a nile lime “N warnings detected“ so there is that. You can just compare an integer to know if there are more warnings… not so difficult, is it?
If you read my comments it should be clear. If not, I cannot help with that. If you want to disagree, as long as you don't work in my code, is ok. This is just my 2ct opinion.