[suby]

Zig looks very promising, but there are a few nitpicks I have which keep me from deep diving into it. The most annoying thing I've found so far is treating unused variables as compiler errors. I understand this is something more and more languages are doing, but I can't get over it. It makes writing and prototyping code annoying and tedious, especially during the initial learning phase. Zig trusts the programmer to do things like manually manage their memory, but unused variables is a bridge too far I guess. I don't understand why this isn't a compiler option.

I don't want to leave a purely negative comment so I'll add that the only reason I'm posting in the first place is because, my own personal annoyances aside, the language does look very nice. Especially comptime, I wish every language had a similar construct built in as seamlessly as it is in zig.

[chienandalou]

If the 'unused variable'-handling is the only thing that holds you back: it's quite simple to build the zig compiler and patch it. See this post by ryuukk in the corresponding issue on github: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/335#issuecomment-10138... and also https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/335#issuecomment-10184...

I use this method to build a zig compiler to work with, and when I build a release build of my zig-project I switch to the official compiler and fix the handful 'unused variable' errors. Works fine for me.

[ihateolives]

Having to build your own version of the compiler to fix this annoyance is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It should be a simple flag, whichever way the default, but it shouldn't require building a compiler.

That's nuts, both in a bad and a good way.

[chienandalou]

I agree, it should be a flag. Or it should be a warning in debug builds, and an error in release builds.

I'm not sure it's nuts to build the compiler to 'fix' this, though. Customizing and building a tool really isn't such a big deal when you think about it.

[anonymoushn]

I have my own version of the stdlib because I don't think formatting a number with leading zeroes should involve parsing UTF-8. It's pretty easy!

I once said I would like arrays of 33 or more items to be Default and my resident Rustacean told me step 1 is to rebuild libcore after changing the appropriate macro :)

[Gibbon1]

That funny. I have one where octal is banned.

[delphLonepaw]

I think the unused error is great, and a lot of people once they got used to it, it becomes quite the useful message, some bugs and some mistakes not easy to catch are quite there now.

Giving it a bit of time is a good way to get used to it and ends generally (at least in my opinion) in better code.

Outside that :shrug:

[cturtle]

You do have a point, it is annoying. I’ve written thousands of lines of zig code at this point, and I still frequently have to go back and fix things when the compiler informs me I left a variable or constant unused.

But I think it is less annoying than trying to figure out why things aren’t working at runtime. It’s an interesting trade off, but I appreciate zig trying something different here.

[kristoff_it]

It does make prototyping more annoying but on the other hand it's nice, when reading code, to know that all variables have a reason to be there / aren't "non sequitur"s. It also catches bugs occasionally.

Making it an optional flag has the issue of making it easier to just say "just compile this always with --allow-unused-vars" instead of cleaning up the code. We kinda see that happening with warnings in C/C++.

That said, I too think we should investigate if there's a reasonable middle ground that could be found.