On Wednesday, 30 March 2016 at 12:57:56 UTC, Mathias Lang wrote:
My question is whether this is just an open issue (I couldn't
find it) or a design decision?
It's a design decision. You want to be able to fix the exact
type of your function, in order to provide headers for them for
example (so you can work with libraries for which the source
code is not available).
If you want attribute inference, you can either make it a dummy
template or, with a recent enough compiler, use `auto` return
type.
OK so it makes sense to recommend to always use `auto` for
non-templated functions in high-level parts of Phobos?
The current guideline recommends to specify the return type for
better readability in the code and documentation, but I guess the
latter can be eventually fixed and having automatic attribute
inference is way more important than the first point?
(given that most of Phobos makes extensive use of templates, this
shouldn't be a huge issue anyway)
