"Ben Voigt" wrote:
It is much more appropriate for tools like lint or team system's
/analyze to detect stuff like this, definitely!
Why? The only reason I can see (not an invalid one to be sure) is so MS
and others can make money charging extra for the advanced analysis.
Certainly most warnings now emitted by the compiler were once the
responsibility of lint. I don't think anyone would now argue having them
in lint is "much more appropriate".
Another reason is limited development resources. MS compiler is already
one of the most feature loaded compiler on the market. It supports native
C++, managed C++ bastard, CLI/C++, a bunch of MS specific features (COM
compiler suppoert, for example) etc. etc. With all that it has good
optimizer, greatly improved templates support and diagnostics and good
standard compliance. In VS2005 Team System suite compiler has lint-like
analysis features, as well. So, you need to draw a line somewhere. You
can't have it all.
I'd like to see lint analysis tool part of VC++ package, however I'm not
sure it should be part of the compiler. Lint attempts to analyze source
code in order to find potential run-time problems. It is logical to
separate this feature from syntactical check, which compiler performs. It
is the same separation as compiler/linker separation, for instance.
desirable to run every compile. But since the compile is where all the
necessary information is, it is the most logical place to run the checks.