Compiling following program gives me a warning that I'm not handling the runtime error "RegexError" with a try clause. I could silence this compiler warning by wrapping this regex literal in a try-catch (RegexError e) { // do nothing } but this makes my program more fragile (i.e. what if someone fixes a bug in this code later so that the regex literal needs to be changed, and that also a typo inserts an extra "\" in the regex at some random place so that it because a invalid regex literal. Now the "error handling" I add to silence the compiler warning will actually suppress a real bug. Not good.

I propose that valac instead prints a compiler warning if a hardcoded string literal is passed into "new Regex()" that is NOT a valid regular expression. If the hardcoded string literal is in fact a valid regex then the code should compile just fine without warnings.

using GLib;
public class Main
{
  public static int main (string[] args)
  {
    Regex regex = new Regex ("FIRST|SECOND", RegexCompileFlags.CASELESS);  
    return 0;
  }
}





main.vala:6.19-6.72: warning: unhandled error `GLib.RegexError'