[throwaway43234]

Right - I understand all that, I just think it's not a good idea. The compiler makers made some things warnings and others errors for a reason, to disregard their input because you have some idea that "warnings are just as bad as errors and should never be permitted in even dev builds of my very highly precious code" is to me a sign of an over-controlling "principle engineer" somewhere behind the scenes that doesn't trust their team, which is not a work environment I'd want to be in. (In the go case, the over-controlling principle engineers creating a work environment I'm not interested in participating in are the language designers themselves!)

I introduce unused variables all the time when I'm debugging/exploring, which always get cleaned up before commit (this is programmatically enforced, which I think is reasonable), to need to go and comment out the declarations for each variable that goes unused if I comment out a section, just because some "principle engineer" somewhere on my team (or the language design team) thinks unused variables are the devil reincarnate and can't be allowed in any build whatsoever is frankly insane. (Don't even get me started on cases where commenting out the declarations changes behavior...)