A dogmatic one, by the sounds of it.

Well if one never stops to think about its potential merits, it can surely only be perceived as dogmatic. One thing is evaluating a choice in its full context and not liking it, another is demanding to have your vision be understood and accepted without being willing to grant the same courtesy first.

> you might want to take a moment to ponder the fact

> 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

I don't program in Zig, but I can think of a few reasons in principle:

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.

> another is demanding to have your vision be understood and accepted without being willing to grant the same courtesy first.

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...

Maybe this becomes the equivalent of `go fmt` in 10 years. “How I learned to stop worrying and love errors-only”

We've had -Werror forever, the consensus is it's a bad idea. In addition to everything else, you can't ever change the warnings, including fixing bugs in them, without potentially breaking code.

> We've had -Werror forever, the consensus is it's a bad idea.

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

Anyone who wants to be able to compile a program with a different or newer compiler than the author last tested it on.