When you need incompetence, you can always count on Microsoft.

[mithriltabby]

A common practice in software engineering is to turn on all the warnings in your compiler, giving it a chance to warn you about unsafe practices, and then to turn on an option that turns warnings into errors so you can’t get code to compile while it is still triggering warnings. This helps avoid dodgy coding practices, though it occasionally necessitates an override when you know damn well what you’re doing and the compiler can’t figure it out. Of course, this requires that the underlying libraries on top of which you’re building your code don’t trigger warnings.

Releasing a compiler where even Hello, world! can’t pass that gauntlet? That takes talent.

Microsoft Windows Hatred Status

LOATHE

Their developers are smoking advanced experimental prototype monkey crack again.

Comments

[codrus.livejournal.com]

It looks like a couple of intrinsics don't have prototypes?

I think we had most warnings on as errors for Virtual PC when I worked there. Definitely not for Office though, since that would have added a billion errors.

(Edited to add: Oh I see, straight C. Yeah, I bet that doesn't get tested much by internal teams at MS.)

[mithriltabby]

I’m amazed their unit tests don’t include “Hello World in C with all warnings turned on and all warnings as errors”.

[codrus.livejournal.com]

Unit tests? What are those? ;)

In no way am I disagreeing with your basic premise -- default programs SHOULD compile without errors or warnings. If I had to wager a guess, it is C (rather than C++) gets almost no effort applied to it. Hell, C++ took a very distant second to all the .NET languages in both VS 2005 and VS 2008.