Don’t put -Weverything in your build flags

What warning flags should you use to compile your project under GCC and/or Clang? Well, everyone should be compiling with -W -Wall (and probably also -Wextra). But some misguided devs are out there compiling with Clang’s -Weverything flag. Stop that!

Clang developer Chandler Carruth writes (December 2011):

-Weverything: This is an insane group that literally enables every warning in Clang. Don’t use this on your code. It is intended strictly for Clang developers or for exploring what warnings exist.

Clang developer James Y. Knight writes (December 2018):

Nobody should be using -Weverything in their default build flags! It should only be used as a way to find the names of interesting warning flags. I’d note that -Weverything even has warnings that conflict with each other…

Mark Dalrymple describes a correct workflow (August 2012):

-Wall, and friends like -Wextra and -pedantic, include a well-defined set of warnings, so you can assured that your code won’t generate new warnings with new versions of your compiler.

With Xcode 4.4, the Apple LLVM compiler introduced -Weverything, which really means, “warn me about everything” … In the real world, I probably won’t turn on -Weverything for day-to-day work on a large project with lots of programmers. … But I’ve started going on occasional warning fix-its — turn it on, build, see what’s warned, and then fix it if appropriate. Then turn it off before committing the changes.

And yet, the misinformation that “-Weverything is a good idea for nightly builds” stubbornly refuses to die. Here’s a partial list of misguided devs promoting the notion:

To be absolutely clear: Don’t use -Weverything in production! Use it temporarily in special one-off builds solely to discover whether a particular warning exists.

For example, if you want to see a warning every time you use long long in your code, start by writing a little test program:

void foo(long long) {}

Then compile it with -Weverything:

test.cpp:1:10: warning: 'long long' is incompatible with C++98 [-Wc++98-compat-pedantic]
void foo(long long) {}
         ^
test.cpp:1:23: warning: C++98 requires newline at end of file [-Wc++98-compat-pedantic]
void foo(long long) {}
                      ^
test.cpp:1:6: warning: no previous prototype for function 'foo' [-Wmissing-prototypes]
void foo(long long) {}
     ^
3 warnings generated.

Then try to pull out the warning option you care about. (In this case you can’t: we can see at a glance that there’s no way to get just the long long warning without also getting the “no newline at end of file” warning.)

Clang provides -Weverything solely to enable this workflow. We see from this example that it would be a bad idea to try to compile our whole project with -Weverything. If we did, then not only would we have to pass -Wno-c++98-compat and -Wno-missing-prototypes right off the bat, but every time we upgraded our compiler, we’d have to update our build flags to include a whole slew of additional -Wno-... options.

GCC does not consider the “warning option discovery” workflow to be important, and therefore does not provide -Weverything. Or, at least, GCC has weighed the benefit of -Weverything for discovery against the risk of misguided devs applying -Weverything in their build options, and in their opinion that risk is not worth the benefit. (See further discussion here.)

Bottom line: Trust Clang’s compiler engineers. Trust them in two ways:

  • Put -W -Wall in your build flags. The Clang devs will take care of making sure this is a sensible warning level for all codebases, including yours.

  • Listen to the Clang devs when they say, “Don’t put -Weverything in your build flags.”

Posted 2018-12-06
c++-style compiler-diagnostics llvm