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

On Sat, 23 May 2026 at 00:09, Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote:
> I do think though that adding it to -Wextra is pointless and maybe just
> keeping them independent is sufficient.  We have projects like the
> OpenSSF C/C++ hardening guide[1] that should plug these options to
> people who would like to see these warnings.  That and maybe enable them
> in -fhardened, although currently that flag only flips options that
> affect codegen (IIRC).

That could actually make sense. -fhardened enables
-D_GLIBCXX_ASSERTIONS and so the std::string and std::vector
preconditions are all checked, which makes most of the "you definitely
have a bug here!" conditions unreachable. That would avoid some of the
most frustrating (and frequently reported) false positives.


> Could we however wait until Andrew MacLeod works through porting the
> pointer-query stuff to pranges and then decide?  It won't bring the
> false positives down to zero, but maybe improve range visibility enough
> (and maybe Andrew cleans more things up as he works on it!) for them to
> be less problematic than what they are today.

Andrew already responded to this part, but I'd like to see them
disabled *first*, then re-enabled if future work shows they're useful
again.

And if they're fine for C, keep them on for C. I don't care about
that. For C++ they're a big problem.