Best compiler warning level for C/C++ compilers? [closed]

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This is a set of extra-paranoid flags I’m using for C++ code:

    -g -O -Wall -Weffc++ -pedantic  \
    -pedantic-errors -Wextra -Waggregate-return -Wcast-align \
    -Wcast-qual  -Wchar-subscripts  -Wcomment -Wconversion \
    -Wdisabled-optimization \
    -Werror -Wfloat-equal  -Wformat  -Wformat=2 \
    -Wformat-nonliteral -Wformat-security  \
    -Wformat-y2k \
    -Wimplicit  -Wimport  -Winit-self  -Winline \
    -Winvalid-pch   \
    -Wunsafe-loop-optimizations  -Wlong-long -Wmissing-braces \
    -Wmissing-field-initializers -Wmissing-format-attribute   \
    -Wmissing-include-dirs -Wmissing-noreturn \
    -Wpacked  -Wpadded -Wparentheses  -Wpointer-arith \
    -Wredundant-decls -Wreturn-type \
    -Wsequence-point  -Wshadow -Wsign-compare  -Wstack-protector \
    -Wstrict-aliasing -Wstrict-aliasing=2 -Wswitch  -Wswitch-default \
    -Wswitch-enum -Wtrigraphs  -Wuninitialized \
    -Wunknown-pragmas  -Wunreachable-code -Wunused \
    -Wunused-function  -Wunused-label  -Wunused-parameter \
    -Wunused-value  -Wunused-variable  -Wvariadic-macros \
    -Wvolatile-register-var  -Wwrite-strings

That should give you something to get started. Depending on a project, you might need to tone it down in order to not see warning coming from third-party libraries (which are usually pretty careless about being warning free.) For example, Boost vector/matrix code will make g++ emit a lot of noise.

A better way to handle such cases is to write a wrapper around g++ that still uses warnings tuned up to max but allows one to suppress them from being seen for specific files/line numbers. I wrote such a tool long time ago and will release it once I have time to clean it up.

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