Subject: Re: [boost] Official warnings policy?
From: Kim Barrett (kab.conundrums_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-11-05 18:46:10
On Nov 5, 2009, at 5:32 PM, Emil Dotchevski wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 1:50 PM, Kim Barrett <kab.conundrums_at_[hidden]
> > wrote:
>>
>> On Nov 5, 2009, at 2:04 PM, Emil Dotchevski wrote:
>>>
>>> - non-virtual-dtor on GCC contradicts a valid design choice.
>>
>> At least in recent versions of gcc, this warning is not generated
>> when there
>> is a non-public dtor.
>
> This doesn't help much. [...] but it will complain in the derived
> class, which typically doesn't even define a destructor explicitly.
Yeah, the problem here is that there's no (easy?) way to indicate that
the derived class is intended to be a leaf class. On the other hand,
once one has paid the cost of making a class polymorphic anyway, is
there really much (if any?) benefit to making its destructor non-
virtual?
Note that there's a related warning turned on by -Weffc++, namely:
"Make destructors virtual in base classes."
This one warns if a class with a non-virtual dtor is used as a base
class. It triggers regardless of the accessibility of that dtor. That
pretty clearly warns about perfectly safe and sensible code.