alt Hacker NewsThanks. I was wondering what this means practically. So they rolled this back because Google who compile with warnings as errors can’t fix these lines? Must be great to be Google and on all these boards. I on the other hand have to deal constantly with breaking changes left and right because someone decided, among them Google (16KB page tables anyone), that going forward stuff works differently.
Google could easily change these lines. The question is, should it?
One thing about Google living so close to head with its libc++ is that it encounters the issues downstream users will encounter, just long before everyone else. It saw this development within a day or two of the or getting merged.
The idiom is unfortunately common in C++ codebases around the world so this was a good predictor that many other users will be broken. It isn’t necessarily erroneous, unlike many of the other no-discard additions made in this patch series.
So the question becomes, “Are the false positives worth the true positives?” Not just for Google, but for the entire user base.
It is reasonable to disagree on this, and often library writers up to date on the latest and greatest miss the issues this sort of change will cause.