How to hide defaulted template parameters in gcc error messages?

Question

Reading through error messages generated by g++ is often a pain because gcc expand names like

std::ostream

in my code into a much longer form

Answer 1

There is no compiler flag to reduce or change the error messages and the related types/templates.

• gcc suppports coloring since gcc 4.9 with -fdiagnostics-color={auto, always, never}. See the documentation here.

---

A number of third party tools exist to help you decrypt error messages:

• GCCFilter for coloring and simplification of error messages (Perl script)
• ColorGCC in the same vein (Perl script), git is here.
• STLFilt : A message filter designed for STL-related diagnostics. Note that it is not supported/developed anymore.

Also as a (very good) alternative, the clang compiler is very, very good at diagnosis and error messages.