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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

One problem I see with this decision is that code will now be littered with:

    _ = bla;
    _ = blub;

...which have been forgotten during development.

So the next thing that's needed is an error if 'bla' or 'blub' are actually used elsewhere ;)

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I've been 99% a Go developer since 2015-ish, and this is not something I've ever encountered, in general people just don't leave unused variables lying around. The compile time check does highlight logic errors frequently enough though, so I'm very glad it's there.

More often than not I end up creating variables for a bunch of chained function calls just to get the debugger output right, I might be holding it wrong though.

It's mostly a problem when you're in the middle of writing something and you're trying to figure out what's going wrong, so you start commenting stuff out... And now you have un-used variables that you have to rename to _ for no good reason. It just adds busywork.

It would be nice if Zig had statement- and expression-level comments, similar to how most Lisps let you comment out whole S-exprs (which still have to be valid). Then it could allow variables that are referenced only from such comments.

Please note there is an accepted proposal[1] to add an unused keyword, making it possible to detect conflicts between things being marked unused and actually being used, and improving tooling integration.

[1]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/10245

I think there should definitely be a global option to disable this during development. This makes temporarily trying something out (e.g commenting out some code to run only part of it) a massive pain, as you have to go up and edit the variable definition as well as the code using it).

agreed. Rust has a warning for unused items, which is indeed interesting to catch logic errors (variables that should be used, but aren't). No need to fail compilation for this. It is then on you to deny warnings in CI to ensure that they are all handled before the code actually lands

Fully agree. I meet with it mostly in typescript’s linter, but recursively having to comment out things is just simply terrible. Of course it is great for prod, but for debug it is very questionable.

I like this a lot. Though, many pls offer making the identifier start with _ to make it unused well.

Sure, but this is an easy thing to audit for (could even be automated as part of some CI system, if you wanted).

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