Frustrating is a much too good of a word to describe this. This is also applicable to unused modules. Take a look at the workaround:
package main
import (
_ "fmt" // no more error
)
func main() {
i := 1 // no more error
_ = i
}
At first I was thinking that this was something they enforced to overcome some limitations in the compiler, but the more I think about it and their other poor decisions introduced in the language, the more I realize that this was most probably the ego of the language designer.
Ya, super annoying. Elixir has the nice in between of just having “warnings” as dev warnings. I wouldn’t have been mad if --warnings-as-errors was set by default when doing MIX_ENV=prod mix compile. OP likely wouldn’t be in the situation they’re in if that were the case, though of course people could still disable it. Some good sense does need to be left up to the developer, of course.
I’ll be a little more charitable and just say the designers are highly opinionated. Which is a GOOD thing - I’d still rather than compared to a language designed by people who aren’t very opinionated and end up with a language that ends up trying to make everyone happy (and as a result, no one is really happy).
That being said… yeah, I am not in love with that choice. But I will give the creators of Golang a lot more credit.
Consider the use case of a variable name typo. For example, let’s say I’ve got code that has someVariable and somevariable (I’m not sure about Go but I do recall that in C variable names are case sensitive). Now in a small function (which is always a good idea) it may just jump out at you that you’ve typo’d the name.
But having seen some legacy code bases where a 500 line routine would be brief, I can say that having the compiler warn me that I’ve got an unused variable (and hence maybe a typo) is actually a good thing. Should that be carried forward into Go and other newer languages? I’m not sure. But I do believe that’s part of the reason the warning exists in the first place.
@Onor.io@dimitarvp thx for bumping this. I guess this doesn’t really answer my question “how can I suppress warnings”, but it does at least address my main reason for wanting to suppress warnings in the first place, so i’ll go ahead and mark dimitarvp as solution because he got the correct version .
Too summarize for anyone seeing this thread in future.
TLDR; It seems elixir intentionally does not allow warning suppression by design. So, you cannot suppress warnings within the compiler. There are two “hacky” ways to functionally get the desired behavior.
If push comes to shove you can always just use your IDE to track errors while completely ignoring the CLI output of the compiler. I use NeoVim’s trouble.nvim, it helps a lot to aggregate all problems into a single pane (warnings included BUT they can be turned off with a setting if memory serves). I am pretty sure VSCode has the same.
I had no intention of debating importance of warnings or other language design decisions. I simply wanted to know how I can suppress warnings.
These threads can be a great resource to quickly answer specific questions. However now, someone else might wonder how to suppress a warning, but instead of quickly seeing a clear answer, they get to read through paragraphs of your opinions and ideas about warnings and other language design decisions. None of which really even attempt to answer my questions.
That “record” didn’t seem so obvious to me otherwise I wouldn’t have even posted this thread to begin with. And yeah I think so too that’s why I initially selected your answer as the solution.
Obviously, it is better to not have warnings than to have warnings and suppress them… Who would think otherwise… If I could flick a magic wand and instantly fix all the thousands of warnings I would.
Again… I’m not defending the suppression of warnings being “sloppy” or the quality of the code itself! I also want them fixed and think they should be fixed, but “should be fixed” is not an answer to my question. I have real problems to solve yesterday and spending the next month fixing warnings is not the main one. I can only chip away at them incrementally. Can you even comprehend what an intermediary step might look like? In real life, you can’t go from thousands of warnings to 0 warnings without taking time substantial time to do so.
I know very little developers that think this, myself included. Sometimes the time to deal with the warnings isn’t worth the time it takes, so you have to suck it up. Nobody likes warnings.
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