Visual C++ Tip: Visual C++ is Broken

Once again, I feel the urge to severely beat the people responsible for Visual C++.

I've once again run into examples of severe stupidity in this compiler. It seems that somehow,
Visual C++ got released without someone checking to see if the standard libraries can actually be compiled at the highest warning levels (for Visual C++ 8, that's with the option /Wall).

It really is quite essential for best practices that a compiler can compile it's own standard libraries at the highest warning levels without producing warnings. Otherwise, it causes obfuscation and hides legitimate messages related to the users' code. What's worse, the warnings produced from the standard library are completely opaque.

Here's an example of the warnings I've been given by the compiler.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\INCLUDE\string.h(141) : warning C4619: #pragma warning: there is no warning number '4609'
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\INCLUDE\wchar.h(116) : warning C4820: '_wfinddata64i32_t' : '4' bytes padding added after data member '_wfinddata64i32_t::attrib'
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\INCLUDE\wchar.h(121) : warning C4820: '_wfinddata64i32_t' : '4' bytes padding added after data member '_wfinddata64i32_t::name'

The first one is a real gem. A warning that there's a warning that doesn't exist. And I think the second one is an indication that there's a nasty shortcut for memory initialisation somewhere. Ugh.

The only lesson here is that the compiler option /Wall is completely unusable. So, use /W4 instead. It's less rigorous, but at least, there's fewer strange warnings emitted from the compiler regarding the standard library at that level. Few enough that they can be disabled or filtered out.