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g++ compiler option -Weffc++

I found it quite interesting to know that g++ compiler actually provides an option (-Weffc++) which enables warnings for constructs that violate guidelines in Effective C++!!

From g++ manual (man g++)
== Begin ==
Warn about violations of the following style guidelines from Scott Meyers’ Effective C++ book:

* Item 11: Define a copy constructor and an assignment operator for classes with dynamically allocated memory.
* Item 12: Prefer initialization to assignment in constructors.
* Item 14: Make destructors virtual in base classes.
* Item 15: Have "operator=" return a reference to *this.
* Item 23: Don’t try to return a reference when you must return an object.

Also warn about violations of the following style guidelines from Scott Meyers’ More Effective C++ book:

* Item 6: Distinguish between prefix and postfix forms of increment and decrement operators.
* Item 7: Never overload "&&", "││", or ",".

When selecting this option, be aware that the standard library headers do not obey all of these guidelines.

== End ==

Indeed, Effective C++ is a very nice work by Scott Meyer. He has compiled two lists of top C++ publications: top 5 books and top 5 articles. His list captures right set of very well written, excellent publications in C++ as I have read most of the literature in those lists. I would also like to add More C++ Gems to that list.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Cool!! I never heard that before
Sat Jan 13, 06:35:00 PM PST
florin said…
it's a nice flag but it outputs way too many warnings: if you have a string as a member of a class and you don't care to call its constructor (because you know that the default constructor will be called), you'll get an useless warning;

it should have a switch to disable warnings for objects (or at least for the STL classes like strings).
Tue May 24, 02:09:00 AM PDT
r2p2 said…
@florin I didn't know about this flag until this post. But I already initialize all my member variables. I think it is the best way to be sure before some M$ compilers will break it. :D

Hope it is readable english. =)
Tue Sep 06, 05:49:00 AM PDT
Anonymous said…
thanks for sharing

gclub
Sat Jun 24, 10:03:00 AM PDT
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