What do you wish your compiler could do for you (that it currently doesn't)? [closed]

Question

What feature do you wish that your compiler possessed that it currently doesn't? And why would it make your job easier? Are there any negative impacts to your new feature?

Just keep it a bit realistic and refrain from answers such as "I wish my compiler could read my mind and write the whole program for me!"

Answer 1

I would love to see better error reporting in compilers. A lot of compilers are very vague about compiling errors, or report the wrong error (i.e. the actual error might cause the compiler to fail at a different line).

To further this, it would be great if compilers could make suggestions to you code... e.g. there was an error on line ##, did you mean ***

Answer 2

Dead code finding

I would love that my compiler find any piece of code/class/functions that is not used, so that I can remove it.

I hate dead code. Deleting unused lines of code is one of my greatest pleasures in programming.

Answer 3

Less cryptic error messages when using C++ templates.

Answer 4

Fix obvious coding typos.

Such as:

1. '.' when I meant '->' and there's no operator overloading, so the compiler knows what I mean.

2. Incorrect casing - 'Class' when I meant 'class', but it's not obvious in my 8pt font on my 2560x2048 display.

3. Simpel lettre trasnposition - 'clsas' when I meant 'class'..

Clearly there are tools like ReSharper that can already do this, but they only work as-you-type and only for certain environments.

The compiler has all the information it needs to determine what I meant and could make an educated guess whether I want to go with the suggestion or not.

Answer 5

I have the pleasure of working on a system with a compiler not as complete as those you find with C/C++/C# or in fact, as complete as almost all other compilers.

What it does not do, is any form of optimisation.

Although I derive a pleasure of sort in working out new ways to optimise code and have even wrote a pre-processor to handle some common cases, I dearly wish it would just to it for me.

---

Primary reason being, we have large batch processes that run every night, as well as even larger day long jobs at every end of month. My hand done optimisations generally result in anywhere between 10-200% improvements. Factor that in to process that take more then 1 day to run and you have meaningful improvements. With a code base > 1M LoC spread over 3000+ programs; it's a task I cannot do in an effective manner.

Give me a supported compiler that does it however and we can simply recompile everything!

And life would be good.

Answer 6

Compiler scripting.

I mean :

• setup a scripting language engine in the compiler (different or not from the compiled language)
• after having parsed and interpreted the compilation unit, when the type graphs or something are available, before applying optimization and conversion to final form, call a compilation-unit-specific script (if provided by the programmer)
• the type information and call graph (informations about the compiled code) are provided to the script and the script can manipulate types and branches as values.
• once the script have finished running, retrieve the potentially modified code informations and continue the compilation process.

In fact C++ template meta-programming is almost that, compile-time language to manipulate types (and potentially branching). But it's not really like having a specific scripting language to do that and allowing to use that scripting language to any language the compiler can work with. And it lacks a type-type system (see Concepts). And it's syntactically hardcore.

I think that would be awesome. However I'm not a compiler implementor so maybe I don't see some "obvious" problem with this idea.

Answer 7

Since I'm using Visual Studio 2008 for C++:

Reliable IntelliSense.

Answer 8

Send an SMS to my phone when compilation finishes.

Be aware of the full build processes so that in can give an ETA of completion.
Do I have time for a coffee or lunch?

Answer 9

I write embedded systems in C. I wish the compiler would output an annotated assembly listing including the time/clocks required for the entire statement.

The gcc -S flag is nice and all but I sometimes need native instructions and a good guestimate of the time for a statement.

For example:

if( foo[idx]->flag ) {
  # 35 instructions; 0.85usec

  do_something(foo[idx]);
  # 12 instructions; 0.23usec

etc. (Numbers for entertainment purposes only.)

Answer 10

I would like a "How do I wrap X to get Y" in Java. Starting with e.g. a FileInputStream ending up in a BufferedReader would be very nice to have suggested to replace with

new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(...)))

Takes a while to figure out on your own while learning.

Answer 11

I wish my linker wouldn't use so much memory, I have to force my window manager into swap space to compile large programs.

Answer 12

I know this is the linker's doing, but I wish the compiler would tell me if I've got the file it's trying to generate locked by the operating system so it doesn't go through the business of trying to compile something that it can never finish.

Answer 13

Automated Distributed build.

I used to work for a company that had a build system that utilized all idle machines in the build processes. When you came back from lunch your machine would be sluggish for about 10 seconds as it finished off the current compilation.

But it paid off when you were building as it not only used your machine but any machine that was currently idle chipped into to build a bit of your code.

Answer 14

Hard-coded "treat warnings as errors" :)

Answer 15

I want my compiler to come with a separate documented framework that it uses to do parsing. Then my IDE could understand the code in the same way my compiler (at least the parsing portion of it) understands it. Basically if a feature was added to the language, and the compiler was extended to support this feature, my IDE would automatically understand it (I suppose it depends on the feature).

I guess XCode 4 does something like this with LLVM, so maybe my compiler does support it. It would be nice if more IDEs used it though.

Answer 16

A really nice feature would be scriptable style guideline enforcing. For example, if I had an opening bracket on the same line as the if statement, and there was no space between the closing parenthesis and opening bracket, give a warning (it really gets on my nerves). I don't mind a variety in the styles various programmers use, but at least let your code breath a little :P

Answer 17

I want of the compiler the ability to replace any function in the standard libraries with my own version. I'm looking at you .NET.

I want Interfaces that contain code & data.

Answer 18

More static analysis along with special pragmas or comments to inform it of your intentions. Help me prove the code does what I intend!

This would be especially useful with multithreaded programming to prove that locks are always taken before shared memory is used.

Answer 19

Hyperlinks(or maybe distinct error codes), along with messages, with each type of error to a forum that tells you how to solve it.

Reason I say this is because i have been facing trouble with svn, it gives one error message which may have several possible causes and I can't figure out which one was the actual cause. (I know svn is not a compiler, btw).

Answer 20

Extended Static Checking

I wish my compiler could check pre- and post-conditions and other invariants at compile time ... that would help me to better document my code and, of course, to find bugs!

See the following attempts to do this: ESC/Java, Spec# and Whiley

Answer 21

I wish that it automatically made me a coffee while it compiles if it expects to take more than 5 minutes.

Answer 22

It's really a language change that I'm asking for here, but I wish C#'s foreach were compile-time checked (and able to make inferences about what non-generic IEnumerables return). (Better still, of course, would be to ditch non-generic IEnumerable entirely).

Answer 23

I wish the Java compiler would recognise SQL statements similar as the C# compiler does with Linq! I don't know how Linq works in detail, but I think it must be awesome if used correctly!

Actually, I would like it to be able to accept any DSL definition, such that I can write my own language extensions without the need of creating a new compiler with the javacc (which I have not tried yet).

Answer 24

Multi-Threading

Oh lord do I wish MSBuild utilized all my cores to compile my project in a timely fashion. :(

Long builds + frequent builds = a lot of wasted time. But at least it gives me the time to answer questions like this. :p

Answer 25

This question es very easy to confuse "What do you wish your compiler could do for you (that it currently doesn't)?" with "What do you wish your programming language could do for you (that it currently doesn't)? (and supported by a compiler)"...