For years I have maintained a zero-tolerance policy for warnings in shipping code. To help me enforce this, my “Release” build configurations define the build setting that induces Xcode to “treat warnings as errors”:

GCC_TREAT_WARNINGS_AS_ERRORS = YES

The comedy of this build setting is that it references “GCC,” a compiler that increasingly few of us even remember Apple ever using for macOS or iOS development. Apple’s fork of the popular open-source compiler was the standard for years, until Apple debuted clang, which is built on the LLVM framework.

It’s always been kind of annoying that, as time moved on, we were stuck specifying important build settings with names that included “GCC,” but I accepted it. After all, I configure the vast majority of these settings in “.xcconfig” files that I reuse in all my projects, so I almost never interact with them directly.

As I’ve started to shift some of my code from Objective-C to Swift, I assumed that my ancient GCC build setting would ensure that I don’t ship any builds with warnings. But today I realized that I had built a release build that didn’t treat a warning as an error. What’s the deal?

It looks like Apple has decided to break with tradition and establish a new build setting for Swift:

SWIFT_TREAT_WARNINGS_AS_ERRORS = YES

Adding this to my .xcconfig file breaks the build when a warning is generated, and prevents me from accidentally shipping code that is known to be vulnerable to unexpected behavior. I think it would have been a nice touch if Apple had inferred SWIFT_TREAT_WARNINGS_AS_ERRORS when GCC_TREAT_WARNINGS_AS_ERRORS is set, so I’ve filed a bug requesting that it does. Radar #35352318.