¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Chris Wellons, My favorite C compiler flags during development:

The major compilers have an enormous number of knobs. Most are highly specialized, but others are generally useful even if uncommon. For warnings, the venerable -Wall -Wextra is a good start, but circumstances improve by tweaking this warning set. This article covers high-hitting development-time options in GCC, Clang, and MSVC that ought to get more consideration.

[…]

Summary:

$ cc -g3 -Wall -Wextra -Wconversion -Wdouble-promotion
   -Wno-unused-parameter -Wno-unused-function -Wno-sign-conversion
   -fsanitize=undefined -fsanitize-trap ...

Such a great post!

Today I learned:

Another common mistake in tutorials is using plain old -g instead of -g3 (read: “debug level 3”). That’s like using -O instead of -O3. It adds a lot more debug information to the output, particularly enums and macros. The extra information is useful and you’re better off having it!

All the major build systems — CMake, Autotools, Meson, etc. — get this wrong in their standard debug configurations. Producing a fully-featured debug build from these systems is a constant battle for me. Often it’s easier to ignore the build system entirely and cc -g3 **/*.c (plus sanitizers, etc.).