[IgorPartola]

I always wondered why so many FOSS projects always generate warnings. I always assumed that the large mature projects like the X server did this because they were performing some crazy optimization that the compiler was too naive to know about. I never had to do this myself, so I thought that the pro's used their arcane knowledge to eek out an extra 0.1% performance out of something for the benefit of everyone. Turns out that the truth is so much less interesting.

[yxhuvud]

Often, it will be because the projects are older than the warnings. And when the amount of warnings cross a threshold, they will not be fixed.

[joosters]

Yes, definitely this. If there are hundreds of warnings, there's no motivation to fix any of them. If there are none, hopefully no-one wants to add the code that creates one.

Perhaps they now need to compile the project with warnings-as-errors to enforce clean code?