The unused variables thing seems like it's downstream of "no warnings, only errors". That is, once you're committed to errors-only, then unused variables are either an error, or not. And if those are your only two choices, then errors sound better.

However, I've written a decent amount of Zig code and that's probably my biggest complaint. Zig has put a ton of effort into making an ultra-fast developer experience with very low iteration times, and it's amazing. But then when I'm refactoring some code or trying to figure stuff out by, for example, commenting out some lines of code, I might get a bunch of unused variable errors. And so I spend more time fixing those than I do even compiling the code itself!

One thing I've seen suggested is using the linter to automatically insert `_ = foo` for unused variables, but I don't love that either because then what even is the point of the error in the first place?

But like I said that's all downstream of the no-warnings policy. And I totally understand the failure mode of warnings - I've worked on plenty of large projects that had 4,000 warnings and everyone ignored them and the actually useful ones would be invisible. Is there some middle ground where, I don't know, Debug builds can have warnings, but Release builds don't?

D started out as a language with no warnings, for the reasons you pointed out. Unfortunately, warnings have crept in from the edges.

I’d go further and say that zig already respects / trusts developers enough to manage their own memory. Philosophically it’s already not a language for sloppy teams who would ignore 4000 compiler warnings if given half a chance.

Zig is a language that demands a lot of rigour of the programmer. It offers a lot of trust. Far more so than Go or even Rust. It’s in light of that philosophy that it seems so weird. The compiler trusts me to manually manage my memory, but it’ll scold me like a naughty child if I ignore an unused variable for 5 minutes? Pick a lane.

I’d love to hear some arguments in support of this choice. The closest I’ve heard is “it doesn’t bother me, personally” - which isn’t a very strong argument.

I’m a little tempted to fork the compiler just to fix this. Can’t be that hard, right?