Re: Is it time to take the middle-end stringop/array warnings out of -Wall?

On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 03:29:18PM +0100, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc wrote:
> The false positive rate has been unacceptably high for years, with
> very little progress on reducing that rate.
[...]
> Despite repeated requests, the warnings still lie. They tell users
> there *is* an overflow, when what they should say is that there might
> be, for some specific control flow which might actually be unreachable
> or in dead code. We should not be lying to users with -Wall.
[...]
> What is a normal user (or even somebody like me who's
> been working on GCC for more than 20 years) supposed to do with a
> typical -Wstringop-overflow warning?
[...]
> This is a massive waste of time for a large number of people who are
> unable to do anything about the false positives.
[...]
> Can we please admit that those warnings do not have a good enough
> signal-to-noise ratio to be in -Wall?
[...]
> Currently the burden of dealing with these false positives is on
> people working on unrelated parts of GCC, and even worse, on end
> users.

As a user who got bitten by that I think it's time. It took me quite
some time to investigate such cases only to be told be Jonathan on IRC
that it's a false-positive and I need to disable the warning explicitly
in CI when running with -Werror. It was a disappointing experience.