Comment by ninkendo

3 months ago

> I wish more languages would lean into having a really permissive compiler that emits a lot of warnings. I have CI so I'm never going to actually merge anything that makes warnings. But when testing, just let me do whatever I want!

I’d go even further and say I wish my whole development stack had a switch I can use to say “I’m not done iterating on this idea yet, cool it with the warnings.”

Unused imports, I’m looking at you… stop bitching that I’m not using this import line simply because I commented out the line that uses it in order to test something.

Stop complaining about dead code just because I haven’t finished wiring it up yet, I just want to unit test it before I go that far.

Stop complaining about unreachable code because I put a quick early return line in this function so that I could mock it to chase down this other bug. I’ll get around to fixing it later, I’m trying to think!

In rust I can go to lib.rs somewhere and #![allow(unused_imports,dead_code,etc)] and then remember to drop it by the time I get the branch ready for review, but that’s more cumbersome than it ought to be. My whole IDE/build/other tooling should have a universal understanding of “this is a work in progress please let me express my thoughts with minimal obstructions” mode.

2 comments

ninkendo

ChadNauseam 3 months ago

On the other hand, I can't count how many times I've written some code like

    let iteration_1_id = 10;
    dostuff(iteration_1_id);
    let iteration_2_id = 11; // warning, unused variable!!
    dostuff(iteration_1_id);

and then spent 10 minutes debugging why iteration_2 wasn't working, when it would have been resolved instantly if I had paid attention to the warnings.