> That said: it's good to remember how much of a breath of fresh air clang was way back when. Error messages in that era of GCC were _terrible_.
I disagree; I think clang set a trend and now GCC's error message are worse than they used to be. In the recent days I've seriously considered patching them out because I'm getting really tired of the wall of text of useless suggestions, macro expansion, etc. that hides the actual error. 99% of the time I just need to see which line my error originates from (before any macro expansion) and I can follow the chain manually in the remaining 1% of cases.
What's happening now is that I have a line with an error, and I get 50 lines of trash output among which the actual error is buried. And trying to jump to the error in my editor has me jump through headers, #include rows, and other garbage, sometimes missing the original error line entirely!
It's ridiculous. The suggestions are also largely either wrong or so obvious that they have only negative value. It's just clutter. Same goes for the ascii art arrows. Just clutter, making it harder to see relevant things.
I can see these messages being helpful for a total newbie who's still acquainting themselves with the standard library and figuring out the basics of the language, but for me (writing C daily for a living, and as a hobby for the past 15+ years) it's just getting in the way.
It's a pity that you weren't instead reminded of -fno-color-diagnostics, -fno-caret-diagnostics, and -fno-diagnostics-show-note-include-stack. You could have told clarry about them. (-:
I disagree; I think clang set a trend and now GCC's error message are worse than they used to be. In the recent days I've seriously considered patching them out because I'm getting really tired of the wall of text of useless suggestions, macro expansion, etc. that hides the actual error. 99% of the time I just need to see which line my error originates from (before any macro expansion) and I can follow the chain manually in the remaining 1% of cases.
What's happening now is that I have a line with an error, and I get 50 lines of trash output among which the actual error is buried. And trying to jump to the error in my editor has me jump through headers, #include rows, and other garbage, sometimes missing the original error line entirely!
It's ridiculous. The suggestions are also largely either wrong or so obvious that they have only negative value. It's just clutter. Same goes for the ascii art arrows. Just clutter, making it harder to see relevant things.
I can see these messages being helpful for a total newbie who's still acquainting themselves with the standard library and figuring out the basics of the language, but for me (writing C daily for a living, and as a hobby for the past 15+ years) it's just getting in the way.