Setting aside the unused variables issue for a moment, you might want to take a moment to ponder the fact that not having warning messages is an explicit design choice, not a missing feature.

> Well if one never stops to think about its potential merits

Listing some of those merits may be more productive than insisting people aren't thinking about it hard enough

1. WYSIWIG compiler: how many people have been complaining lately about C compilers eliminating code on them due to undefined behaviour? If you eliminate certain optimizations so your complier doesn't do this, like dead code/variable elimination, then what the code looks like is exactly what executes. This means some important optimizations may have to be done by hand. Eliminating dead variables could be one of them.

2. Arguably dead variables are a mistake. Either they're a (major) mistake because you neglected to include a value in your computation, or a (minor) mistake because you declared a superfluous variable that's never used.

3. If you want your code to be clear and as self-documenting as possible, unused variables are an impediment. I can't speak to the accuracy of Zig's analysis, but I can see how it would be annoying while working out an algorithm.

Is it available somewhere? I can't think anything why that compiler patch[0] can't be upstream (of course not default, but under a flag/different build mode/config option).

[0]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/335#issuecomment-10138...

Says who? Package repo maintainers? -Werror is actually quite divisive.

I see this comment a lot in response to feedback: "Don't like it? Don't use it!" Every single time, it reads to me as "stop complaining!" For as many times as I've seen the comment, I haven't been able to read it any other way.

Am I being uncharitable or is it really just a clear-cut attempt to silence debate?

On the other hand in case cloud services like those provided Google/FB/Twitter/Cloudflare etc it is much more difficult to just go with "Don't use if you don't like" because not only there are not much alternative but also because sometimes Cloud service providers act in unison. So if one is pushed out from a service they are likely to be pushed from all other services too.

All of this says to me that Zig is taking the wrong approach. Making highly controversial, opinionated features the standard with no way to opt out just leads to these endless debates. Languages (or any tools, for that matter) that stay out of the debate and just give everyone a flag tend to have much more welcoming communities.

I’m not usually a “just don’t use it” kind of guy, but in this case it’s valid, imo.