Mitigating the attribute proliferation - attribute inference for functions

[ponce via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 17 July 2015 at 16:40:56 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> @nogc is mostly a PR thing IMHO. It has value in that it helps 
> you find places where you accidentally used the GC (though if 
> you really care, you can always use the profiler as you point 
> out), and if @nogc is marked explicitly, it makes it easier to 
> see which functions can be used in @nogc code, but ultimately, 
> it really seems like it's there simply to appease the folks who 
> don't want any GC usage at all.

I thought it was a PR thing, but because few things use malloc 
implicitely and @nogc enforce no GC, I find it actually useful to 
check if a function does zero allocations. Not the worst 
attribute.

> Honestly, what we should do if we don't care about code 
> breakage is make pure and @safe the default, since they really 
> should be the rule rather than the exception. That would reduce 
> the problem considerably. But the problem is that that breaks 
> code, and without @safe whitelisting stuff instead of 
> blacklisting it, it would probably make the breakage related to 
> fixing @safe holes even worse. So, I very much doubt that we 
> can do it at this point, much as that's really where we want to 
> be.

Please no. Code is born ugly and then gets better and attributed. 
For scripting and peace of mind, D gets every default right; it's 
just that some attributes are not really worth it and should be 
killed imho.