RFC: Improving Clang’s Diagnostics

[banach-space]

Thank you for working on this!

Your proposal focuses on the user-facing aspects of the diagnostics. Like Richard, I’m curious about the implementation details that will affect Clang developers:

@cjdb

Richard Smith notes that we haven’t addressed any of the following:

• How will this be integrated into the Clang codebase?
• How invasive will the changes be?
• What are the criteria for determining if this experiment is successful?
• How do we plan to maintain this if it’s successful?
• How do we plan to roll this back if it’s not?
• How much harder does this make it to implement new functionality requiring new diagnostics?

We intend to begin answering these questions within the next fortnight, and provide a preliminary report as a follow-up to this document.

Looking forward to the follow-up

Also,

@cjdb

While we will be driving the initial effort, we would like for there to be serious community buy-in.

That is: we’ll be contributing the structural changes and other tooling, but will need the community’s assistance in the more fine-grained things such as specific diagnostics, if we’re to complete this in a reasonable timeframe.

I think that there’s going to be a lot work required to update and to document the diagnostics with relevant links or better wording. Doing that shouldn’t require much compiler (or Clang) knowledge. Perhaps it’s worth reaching out to other communities (e.g. C++ or Objective-C) that could be interested in contributing?

Just my 2p,

-Andrzej