C++ Boost: what's the cause of this warning?
It is nothing to worry about. In the last few releases of MSVC, they've gone into full security-paranoia mode. std::copy issues this warning when it is used with raw pointers, because when used incorrectly, it can result in buffer overflows.
Their iterator implementation performs bounds checking to ensure this doesn't happen, at a significant performance cost.
So feel free to ignore the warning. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with your code. It is just saying that if there is something wrong with your code, then bad things will happen. Which is an odd thing to issue warnings about. ;)
You can also disable this warning in specific headers:
#if defined(_MSC_VER) && _MSC_VER >= 1400
#pragma warning(push)
#pragma warning(disable:4996)
#endif
/* your code */
#if defined(_MSC_VER) && _MSC_VER >= 1400
#pragma warning(pop)
#endif
If you feel safe about disabling this error:
- Go to the properties of your C++ project
- Expand the "C/C++"
- Highlight "Command Line"
- Under "Additional Options" append the following to any text that might be in that box
" -D_SCL_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS"
The warning comes from Visual Studio's non-standard "safe" library checks introduced starting with MSVC 8.0. Microsoft has identified "potentially dangerous" APIs and has injected warnings discouraging their use. While it is technically possible to call std::copy in an unsafe way, 1) receiving this warning does not mean you are doing so, and 2) using std::copy as you normally should is not dangerous.