alt Hacker NewsGreat news! As someone who's moving back to a C++ job after having worked with Rust for several years now, the error message parsing is one of the things I've been dreading the most... I'm still dreading it, but now sliiightly less.
Also, that interactive `-fanalyze`-output with the pointer visualisation looks super handy!
Happy to see there's still focus on the DX in GCC. C and C++ sorely needs it.
Replies
ramon156 • today at 7:45 AM
While the new error message pinpoints the location of the error better, you have to dig through so much text to find it. Why not have a verbose mode that you can turn off so you only get the last trace of the error message? clippy does this so well, plus you get a suggested fix
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This has appeared multiple times over the years as “compiler improves c++ errors” and is even the reason given as motivating things like concepts. Sure it keeps improving but the errors don’t seem to actually get smaller. The problem is inherent to templates - c++ got it wrong by having templates start weakly typed and it has no mechanisms to correct it in the language - concepts helped but didn’t definitively fix it and also are a serious level of complexity (ie for writing and defining concepts) - it just shifted the burden one level but ultimately the mess is still there.
After more than 20 years in c++, I gave up that the situation will ever really be fixed vs constantly being made better at the margins, but not as fast as new ideas get added to the language.