template paradigm and explicit warning

Question

Hello guys,

I was trying to compile a short example program ( 134 lines ) making extensive use of templates, and got nothing less than 500 lines of mysterious code really deep inside the template library, which is quite annoying and useless.

My point isn't how to solve this issue (most probably add the appropriate path to the project..), but I had this problem several times already, and so I have rather an open question in mind : is there any way to improve the understandability of template-related warnings ? Do you experience similar issues ? How do you usually solve them ?

Answer 1

From wikipedia:

Error messages involving templates tend to be very long and difficult to decipher. This problem has been considered so severe that a number of tools have been written which simplify and prettyprint STL-related error messages to make them more comprehensible.

There are tools to improve the understandability of such error messages, most notable stlfilt.