[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#3427) Remove noreturn attribute

["Raimar Falke" <rf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 11:13:05AM -0800, Jason Short wrote:
> Raimar Falke wrote:
> > 
> > Non-gcc compiler will complain about the missing return statements and
> > so on.
> 
> I'm strongly against this change.

> The purpose of getting compiler warnings is to catch bugs.  Only a small 
> portion of compiler warnings are actually because of bugs, but it is 
> nonetheless an efficient way to find them.

> Warnings generated by the noreturn attribute are much better than
> the 'average' warning in terms of finding bad pieces of code.

I don't see what useful compiler warnings could be generated by
noreturn. The only warning I can think of is something like "warning:
statement in line xyz not reached" in

   die(...);
   x=y;

> I don't think it is a good trade-off to give up this checking in
> return for removing a few compiler warnings on a compiler that few
> (if any) of the developers use.

> Further, it is not necessary for everyone to see all the compiler 
> warnings.  If someone compiles on intel cc and writes a code that 
> generates a warning under gcc, any of the gcc-using developers can see 
> and correct this.  Unless intel cc can provide a better error-catching 
> warning set than the one we'd have to give up to use it, I don't think 
> the switch is worth it.

Hmmmm. I was going to give you the error messages of the sun compiler
to that this is unrelated to icc and every non-gcc compiler is
affected. It turns out that the compiler happily eats:

void f(void);

struct b;

int n;

struct b *g(int x)
{
  if (x == 0)
    return (struct b *) 4;
  else
    f();
  n=x;
}

I consider this an error.

        Raimar

-- 
 email: rf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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