Why is there a performance warning on cast pointer to bool?

Question

Extends.

I thought I was being cool when I did something like:

bool hasParent()
{
  return this->parentNode ;
}

Even with a (bool) cast, the

Answer 1

The fact that casting to bool does not make the warning go away is by design:

Casting the expression to type bool will not disable the warning, which is by design.

I would recommend the approach that the MSDN description of warning C4800 recommends:

return this->parentNode != NULL;

this makes it clear that you are returning true if parentNode is not a null pointer and false if parentNode is a null pointer.