Why should I always enable compiler warnings?

Question

I often hear that when compiling C and C++ programs I should \"always enable compiler warnings\". Why is this necessary? How do I do that?

Sometimes I also hear tha

Answer 1

The fact that C++ compilers accept compiling code that obviously results in undefined behavior at all is a major flaw in the compilers. The reason they don't fix this is because doing so would probably break some usable builds.

Most of the warnings should be fatal errors that prevent the build from completing. The defaults to just display errors and do the build anyway are wrong and if you don't override them to treat warnings as errors and leave some warnings then you will likely end up with your program crashing and doing random things.