In detail.

Understanding GCC warnings

by Martin Sebor

From the article:

Most of us appreciate when our compiler lets us know we made a mistake. Finding coding errors early lets us correct them before they embarrass us in a code review or, worse, turn into bugs that impact our customers. Besides the compulsory errors, many projects enable additional diagnostics by using the -Wall and -Wextra command-line options. For this reason, some projects even turn them into errors via -Werror as their first line of defense. But not every instance of a warning necessarily means the code is buggy. Conversely, the absence of warnings for a piece of code is no guarantee that there are no bugs lurking in it...