Why am I always getting warnings when running Boost code?

Question

I notice that I am getting a ton of warnings when I run code examples from the Boost website. For example, this program:

#include <cassert>
#include <string>
#include <boost/iostreams/device/back_inserter.hpp>
#include <boost/iostreams/filtering_stream.hpp>

namespace io = boost::iostreams;

int main()
{
    using namespace std;

    string                 result;
    io::filtering_ostream  out(io::back_inserter(result));
    out << "Hello World!";
    out.flush();
    std::cout << result;
}

These are the warnings I get (I've taken out most of the blood and guts):

warning: declaration of 'close' shadows a member of 'this' [-Wshadow]
warning: declaration of 'ptr' shadows a member of 'this' [-Wshadow]
warning: declaration of 'close' shadows a member of 'this' [-Wshadow]
warning: declaration of 'next' shadows a member of 'this' [-Wshadow]
warning: declaration of 'component_type' shadows a member of 'this' [-Wshadow]
warning: declaration of 'close' shadows a member of 'this' [-Wshadow]
warning: declaration of 'component_type' shadows a member of 'this' [-Wshadow]
warning: declaration of 'next' shadows a member of 'this' [-Wshadow]
warning: declaration of 'close' shadows a member of 'this' [-Wshadow]
warning: declaration of 'next' shadows a member of 'this' [-Wshadow]
warning: declaration of 'close' shadows a member of 'this' [-Wshadow]

Why is this happening? Could it be possible that I did something wrong while installing Boost?

Answer 1

Likely this just means the compiler has implemented more stringent warnings.

Upstream will (usually) fix the code for these compilers if your compiler version/platform is supported.

You can usually hide warnings for system headers by doing eg

-isystem /path/to/boost

(ie instead of -I /path/to/boost )

Answer 2

It's not just you. Others have also reported this issue. Your code is fine though.