Great news! As someone who's moving back to a C++ job after having worked with Rust for several years now, the error message parsing is one of the things I've been dreading the most... I'm still dreading it, but now sliiightly less.
Also, that interactive `-fanalyze`-output with the pointer visualisation looks super handy!
Happy to see there's still focus on the DX in GCC. C and C++ sorely needs it.
This has appeared multiple times over the years as “compiler improves c++ errors” and is even the reason given as motivating things like concepts. Sure it keeps improving but the errors don’t seem to actually get smaller. The problem is inherent to templates - c++ got it wrong by having templates start weakly typed and it has no mechanisms to correct it in the language - concepts helped but didn’t definitively fix it and also are a serious level of complexity (ie for writing and defining concepts) - it just shifted the burden one level but ultimately the mess is still there.
After more than 20 years in c++, I gave up that the situation will ever really be fixed vs constantly being made better at the margins, but not as fast as new ideas get added to the language.
You're not wrong there. The late stage (compilation wise) of template instantiation doesn't help either, as so much context has been built up. The art of debugging C++ compiler output is knowing which 90% to ignore. If you read it all you'll simply go mad.
Concepts at least tells you which criteria you didn't satisfy (as long as the concept is correct...), which - admittedly - feels like putting a bandaid on bullet wound.
Concepts could be much better, but first we only got the light version, and secondly the effort hasn't been there regarding improving the error messages.
Also, so far I would say they haven't been getting people rushing out to use them anyway, as C++20 is still too new for many projects.
Even GCC only now changed to C++20 as default mode.
The problem isn't C++, the problem is that the meagre resources those teams have available, rather spend their time catching up to ISO C and ISO C++, than improving error messages.
Hence why SARIF has seen big adoption, as they hope that by exposing that , there are others ways to have others have tools that process SARIF.
Wow I never thought I'd see GCC innovating with error messages!
I looked into using SARIF once before and found it's an enormous over-engineered design-by-committee spec, but I guess it's still better than regexes (do people really do that?).
Also, that interactive `-fanalyze`-output with the pointer visualisation looks super handy!
Happy to see there's still focus on the DX in GCC. C and C++ sorely needs it.
After more than 20 years in c++, I gave up that the situation will ever really be fixed vs constantly being made better at the margins, but not as fast as new ideas get added to the language.
Concepts at least tells you which criteria you didn't satisfy (as long as the concept is correct...), which - admittedly - feels like putting a bandaid on bullet wound.
Also, so far I would say they haven't been getting people rushing out to use them anyway, as C++20 is still too new for many projects.
Even GCC only now changed to C++20 as default mode.
Hence why SARIF has seen big adoption, as they hope that by exposing that , there are others ways to have others have tools that process SARIF.
I looked into using SARIF once before and found it's an enormous over-engineered design-by-committee spec, but I guess it's still better than regexes (do people really do that?).