Is it a good idea to eliminate compiler warnings?

Question

In the past I\'ve worked with -Wall and other switches for gcc to eliminate every compiler warning for projects I\'ve been involved in. Similarly, in Perl, I always program wit

Answer 1

I agree with all the answers that say "fix them all", but I'd still like to present an opposing view:

There are legacy systems where some (many or all) components are without a dedicated maintainer and large parts of the system are basically unknown. Fixing compiler warnings in such unknown code can take a considerable amount of code (since for each warning the code together with its context needs to be understood) and introduces a possible source of errors (some code depends on undefined behaviour). And since such legacy systems rarely have extensive test coverage you can't even rely on the tests to notify you of regressions.