MSVS/MSVC Static Template Class Method Does Not Warn

Question

A while ago, this question was asked, regarding the familiar

error: 'static' can only be specified inside the class definition

error.

In my current use-case, I am moving from a very MSVC project, where almost all the code is compiled using MSVC, and cross compiling for Android.

I noticed that there is no MSVC error, least of all, a warning, about static class methods having definitions inside (outside) the class. Am I missing something? Why is there not at least a warning?

---

EDIT

To clarify, I am asking why there is no proper MSVC/MSVS warning for code such as this (taken from the link, above):

class Foobar {
public:
  static void do_something();
};
static void Foobar::do_something() {} // Error!

int main() {
    Foobar::do_something();
}

---

EDIT

So sorry evey one! This sample doesn't work! My apologies.

class Foobar {
public:
  template<class Y> 
  static int do_something();
};

template<class Y> 
static int Foobar::do_something() {return 1;} // Error!

int main() {
    return Foobar::do_something<double>();
}

Here is the output from MSVC 19.14 (success), and GCC 4.12 (failure).

Answer 1

VS 2012 Update 5, VS 2013 Update 5, VS 2015 Update 3 and VS 2017 (15.9 update) all report an error for this code:

error C2724: 'Foobar::do_something': 'static' should not be used
             on member functions defined at file scope

I'm guessing the code built only with an older, non-conformant version of Visual C++.

Note that if you want to clean up code using the Visual C++ compiler to make it easier to port to other platforms:

• You can use VS 2017 with the /permissive- switch. See this blog post.

• There are a number of conformance switches to try as well such as /Zc:__cplusplus. See this blog post.

Using /permissive- already implies /Zc:strictStrings, /Zc:rvalueCast, and /Zc:ternary and enables two-phase name look-up.

• You can also use /Wall, although it takes some effort to get all the noise down to see the useful warnings. It's still not as fussy as clang, but it's helpful. For an example of a bunch of stuff to suppress, see the top of this header.

• There is also an experimental C99 preprocessor you can try, although that one is still in the early stages. See this blog post

You can try it out yourself with the VS 2017 Community edition.