Re: Compile warnings
- From
Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
- Date
- Nov 14, 2011, 20:36 UTC
- Message-ID
- <7v39dqjvbj.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
- In-Reply-To
- <op.v4xyekju0aolir@keputer>
"Frans Klaver" <fransklaver@gmail.com> writes:
Show 5 quoted lines
> Every now and then I see an 'unused result' warning come by during > building. What is the general attitude towards these warnings? Remove > them (by properly checking)? Or leave them be as a kind of > documentation -- we know we're ignoring the info, but it's good to be > reminded?
A callsite of a function whose return value is better checked should be checked (e.g. not checking return from close(2) or write(2) in a non-error codepath), but there is no strong mechanical "General attitude".
Sprinkling (void) that casts the return values all over the place makes our code illegible, and we do not prefer it as a solution. A function that returns a value that is useful for some callers but can be safely ignored by others is sometimes an indication of a poor API, and for our own code, we tend to prefer designing the API to pass optional pointer to return value from callers that do want to use the return value (and others that do not care about the return value pass NULL).