45
Why Git Has a Variable Named false_but_the_compiler_does_not_know_it_
(blog.codingconfessions.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
45 points (94.1% liked)
Technology
85670 readers
5247 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
My guess would be they didn't like how verbose it was to supress the warning for all the compilers they use, or maybe they have a coding standard not to suppress warnings, and this was a workaround for that ๐
actually not sure, as they do use
#pragma GCC diagnostic ignoredin a couple of places :https://github.com/git/git/blob/8d96f09e9245ddf80c1981476fcbac8c4bb4125f/compat/win32/headless.c#L14
https://github.com/git/git/blob/8d96f09e9245ddf80c1981476fcbac8c4bb4125f/compat/regex/regex.c#L20
but apparently that disables it for everything after that line in the file though:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48426484/concise-way-to-disable-specific-warning-instances-in-clang#comment83878587_48426846
I think the second answer on that stackoverflow post might be better than
false_but_the_compiler_does_not_know_it_though...