[cfe-commits] [PATCH] Limit the number of overload candidates printed (issue1591041)

[Douglas Gregor]

On Jun 8, 2010, at 1:06 PM, Jeffrey Yasskin wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 7:49 AM, Douglas Gregor <dgregor at apple.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Jun 7, 2010, at 6:03 PM, jyasskin at gmail.com wrote:
> >
> >> Reviewers: cfe-commits_cs.uiuc.edu,
> >>
> >> Message:
> >> Please take a look. If you prefer reviewing diffs, they're behind the
> >> "Download raw patch set" link.
> >>
> >> Description:
> >> When there are lots of operator<<s, clang produces significantly worse
> >> diagnostics than gcc, simply because of the size of the output. This
> >> patch limits clang to 4 overload candidates, with the ability to show
> >> the rest by passing -fshow-all-overloads, as a first cut. We'll want to
> >> refine that later as examples of bad behavior come up.
> >
> >
> > Unless we can be fairly sure that the "right" operator<< is in those first 4 overload candidates, I don't think this is a good idea. Unlike with suppressing inner template/macro instantiation histories, this change is likely to suppress important information.
> >
> 
> I agree that it will sometimes suppress important information. That's why I added the -fshow-all-overloads flag so the user can get it back if they need it.

Sure, and it's good to have -fshow-all-overloads for any kind of pruning. My concern is that if the pruning is not good by default, we'll end up causing more harm than good: the user will have to bounce between -fshow-all-overloads and non-fshow-all-overloads whenever they hit problems. That's worse than having a longer diagnostic chain in the first place.

> But in cases like the one below, there are too many overloads printed to find the "right" one, even if it were present, and they just discourage users from reading any of them. 4 is clearly not the right cut-off in all cases, and cutting off after a drop in quality is likely to be better in many cases, but it fixes some of the most egregious behavior pretty easily. We can fix places where it omits useful overloads as they come up.

We can, but our heuristics are known not to be that good, so we won't even have a good sense of how useful this change is until we have better heuristics.

> If you prefer, I can look for a quality drop based on CompareOverloadCandidatesForDisplay instead of the fixed cutoff. I'll want a hard cutoff around 6-10 anyway, since at that point I think most users give up on our errors and just stare at the source instead.


I think a quality-based cutoff is the only workable solution, so IMO we need that before we can turn this behavior on by default. 

It would probably make sense to have the flag set 

	-fshow-overloads={best,all}

so that we have the option later of adding different tweaks/heuristics (e.g., "detailed", to really show what happens for each overload). Otherwise, we'll end up with several -fshow-*-overloads flags.

	- Doug
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