On Friday, 17 July 2015 at 19:14:21 UTC, Jack Stouffer wrote:
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.
As I mentioned, @safe doesn't provide any guarantee and pure/nothrow provide nice guarantees, but ones that should be a matter of course depending on the API.
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.
Except that it hardly works, b/c noone made the effort to attribute all of druntime/phobos. We also have the -vgc switch btw.
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.
One of our biggest issues is the lack of good contributions, so deciding to spend a significant overhead on attributes is a big deal, which I doubt will ever pay off.
