[defen]

I love Zig and I am generally very happy with Andrew's benevolent dictatorship and the benefits of having one single smart tasteful person in charge of decisions, but the unused variable one really hurts. My guess is that he's seen what a mess C code can be with regard to warnings and so is just totally unwilling to compromise by adding the concept of warnings to Zig. But if I had one wish about the language, it would be for a command-line flag to disable unused variable errors. So much effort has been put into making iteration fast (all this build system stuff, the custom backend, incremental compilation) and then there's just this giant blocker preventing fast iteration on the editing side.

[galaxyLogic]

Why not just comment out variables you "want to keep around" but are not used anywhere?

[throwawayk7h]

it's just annoying to have to do that.

[galaxyLogic]

The converse is that if you have many unused variables some of them are used in some contexts but not others and then when you use FIND to find occurrences of a variable you will find many which are not relevant and some which are.

Overall the code gets smaller and easier to understand when it only has things that need to be there. If you comment out a an unused variable you can see from find-results that in effect that occurrence cannot matter.

Unused variables are "noise" that hide actually important things.