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> Yes, but as far as I know the Zig compiler cannot emit warnings, only errors. Because warnings are potential footguns too and we can't have that.

Okay they're kind of on to something here, because in my experience with C, warnings just get ignored. And you only get warning if you're doing something really suspicious in the first place.

Every serious C project I've worked on has used -Werror.

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I 100% understand the motivation and agree with it. But an optional compiler flag would be nice for development, instead of the special syntax that has to be applied per unused identifier.

And I just don't get why the compiler has to throw an error about a formatting preference when the builtin formatter already changes it accordingly. Any serious project can just mandate use of the formatter to keep things consistent and be done with it. Instead the github issues have people debate tabs vs spaces because the compiler took a side in order to end the "bikeshed of all bikesheds", ironically contributing to it.

> Every serious C project I've worked on has used -Werror.

-Werror is a good default for CI, but not for local development.

Yeah I would agree, same with unused variables.

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