For a while now GDC and LDC have supported a variety of their backend's attributes, like inlining or compiling a specific function with SSE4 in an otherwise generic x64 build.
I think we should unify those into a common core.attribute, either aliasing or replacing the vendor specific symbols. They don't need to be functional immediately. There are two things that I see need to be discussed. 1. Syntax All attributes are currently set via @attribute(…). I wonder if this is just easier to recognize for the compiler than multiple attribute names or if there are other benefits. Personally for the most part I'd prefer shorter versions, e.g. @forceinline instead of @attribute("forceinline"). We can also achieve this by keeping the vendor specific modules/symbols and creating aliases, so it is mostly about what we prefer. 2. Semantics Unfortunately the compiler internals are all quite different. When it comes to always inlining a function for example, DMD won't even try unless "-inline" is given on the command-line. GCC will fail compilation if it cannot inline and I think LLVM only warns you in such cases. My somewhat painful idea is to split these attributes up into something like @forceinline (produces warning or error) and @inline (silent or warning at most) and map them to the closest the respective compilers can offer - or else make them a noop. https://github.com/mleise/fast/blob/master/source/fast/helpers.d#L99 shows how we alias existing attributes or make them noops: version (DigitalMars) { enum noinline; enum forceinline; enum sse4; } else version (GNU) { import gcc.attribute; enum noinline = gcc.attribute.attribute("noinline"); enum forceinline = gcc.attribute.attribute("forceinline"); enum sse4 = gcc.attribute.attribute("target", "sse4"); } else version (LDC) { import ldc.attribute; enum noinline = ldc.attribute.attribute("noinline"); enum forceinline = ldc.attribute.attribute("alwaysinline"); enum sse4; } (Note that GCC's target attribute can actually takes a list of features.) If you target i586 and started using SSE, the compiler would tell you that these instructions do not exist on that architecture. So you write a generic function and an additional SSE function with @attribute("target", "sse") and wont run into "illegal instruction" errors at runtime on older CPUs. -- Marco