VS lets you choose the compiler warning level, 0 to 4.
Higher is good because compiler warnings often indicate bugs.
However, some warnings are noise, and having a lot of them is bad
because they conceal the important ones.
As an example, a recent update to VS2010 causes it to spew warnings of the form
"function _strdup() is deprecated; use _strdup() instead.
So the new policy is:
- everything compiles with warning level 4
- in boinc_win.h we use #pragmas to suppress 3 specific warnings
that occur a lot in our code, and are not bugs:
- the _function names as described above
- constant conditional expression (like while(1))
- conversion from int to char
And the goal is to build everything with zero warnings
except from outside code like zip.
We're pretty close to that.
The project files for other VS versions should be modified
to also use level 4 everywhere.
This was a hold over from the Win9x days when a console application window could not be hidden by the processed that launched it. Since we no longer need to support Win9x we can get rid of this hack.
NOTE: At some point parameter parsing and processing the job file was moved ahead of the diagnostics initialization code. This had the unfortunate consequence of making errors that happened before the diagnostics code initialized disappear.
Switching wrapper to a console application will mean that launching it from a console window will cause the console window to block and display anything written to stderr/stdout regardless of whether the diagnostics code is initialized.
David Anderson