Annotations or custom attributes

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2012-03-09 11:56, Manu wrote:
> Does D have a nice way to add annotations or custom attributes to entities?

Unfortunately no.

> In Java/C# for example, it is common to annotate things with useful
> compile time information. I'd like to be able to do that in D on occasion.
>
> For instance, I'm serialising some struct/class using reflection to some
> text format, but there are a couple of members in a particular class
> that I don't want to be written.
> A nice solution might be that I could annotate various members:
> @DoNotSerialise int thing; ... or something along those lines, whatever
> concept you want to apply, which I could then inspect in static if()
> logic to produce some requested additional behaviour.
>
> This is a trivial example, but looking at C#/Java, you can see how many
> useful things can be done with this sort of system.
> How would it be done currently?

Yeah, it would be so nice to have. As a workaround you can mixin some 
code, variables or similar in a class/struct.

For serialization you could use my library Orange, which already 
supports this.

You can have a look at the NonSerialized template at:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18386187/orange_docs/orange.serialization.Serializable.html

https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/orange

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg