On Friday, 17 July 2015 at 18:11:46 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
Because I want to overhaul smart pointers/refs (Unique, RC).
A seemingly trivial task, should take a few hours, but I
already spent days to hack around all the attribute issues.
I think the axiom "make it hard for engineers so it's easy for
users" applies here.
As others have said @safe, pure, nothrow, and @nogc, while they
could be improved somewhat, have value in that they provide
guarantees to the programmer (user) and API end users. One thing
that no one has mentioned is that @nogc lets me know which part
of my program is using GC allocations without reaching for a
profiler. Saying "just use -profile=gc" would be like always
reaching for gdb when printf will solve your problem faster.
This however, makes the phobos maintainer (engineers) job harder,
and I respect that. But, as a casual D user, I think attributes
make D a better language.
