A recent comment by Joe D’Andrea in a previous post reminded me about the importance of removing compiler warnings in Xcode projects. Most importantly, it reminded me of a conversation with a fellow developer a couple of weeks ago, in which he told me that he was surprised to see that my projects compiled all the time without warnings. Not a single one. Nada. And that I took the time to remove them before checking code into source control.
He actually didn’t know you could remove all compiler warnings; he thought Objective-C was the land of compiler warnings. This situation, I think, is far from exceptional, and due mostly to cultural and technical reasons.
It is my opinion, that removing compiler warnings is basic project hygiene, like writing unit tests, or using the Clang Static Analyzer. I will explain in this post some techniques I use to remove warnings in my Objective-C code.
