On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 03:29:18PM +0100, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc wrote: > The false positive rate has been unacceptably high for years, with > very little progress on reducing that rate. [...] > Despite repeated requests, the warnings still lie. They tell users > there *is* an overflow, when what they should say is that there might > be, for some specific control flow which might actually be unreachable > or in dead code. We should not be lying to users with -Wall. [...] > What is a normal user (or even somebody like me who's > been working on GCC for more than 20 years) supposed to do with a > typical -Wstringop-overflow warning? [...] > This is a massive waste of time for a large number of people who are > unable to do anything about the false positives. [...] > Can we please admit that those warnings do not have a good enough > signal-to-noise ratio to be in -Wall? [...] > Currently the burden of dealing with these false positives is on > people working on unrelated parts of GCC, and even worse, on end > users.
As a user who got bitten by that I think it's time. It took me quite some time to investigate such cases only to be told be Jonathan on IRC that it's a false-positive and I need to disable the warning explicitly in CI when running with -Werror. It was a disappointing experience.
