Andrei's list of barriers to D adoption

Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Tue Jun 7 14:43:18 PDT 2016


On Tuesday, June 07, 2016 17:28:27 Steven Schveighoffer via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> On 6/7/16 5:10 PM, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > On Tuesday, June 07, 2016 20:52:15 Dave via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> >> On Tuesday, 7 June 2016 at 20:48:13 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> >>> On Tuesday, June 07, 2016 18:33:01 Dave via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> >>>> [...]
> >>>
> >>> IMHO, it's bad practice to mass apply attributes with labels or
> >>> blocks. It's far too easy to accidentally mark a function with
> >>> an attribute that you didn't mean to, and it makes it way
> >>> harder to figure out which attributes actually apply to a
> >>> function. And when you add templates into the mix, applying
> >>> attributes en masse doesn't work anyway, because pretty much
> >>> the only time that you want to mark a template function with an
> >>> attribute is when the template arguments have nothing to do
> >>> with whether the attribute is appropriate or not.
> >>>
> >>> [...]
> >>
> >> So we should not follow the advice of Walter?
> >
> > If he's arguing that you should slap an attribute on the top of your
> > module to apply to everything, then no, I don't think that we should
> > follow
> > his advice. He's a very smart guy, but he's not always right. And in my
> > experience, mass applying attributes is a mistake.
>
> The original(?) complaint was that it's hard to grep for @system because
> it's the default.
>
> I think the advice is to put the attribute at the top to see where your
> non-conforming code lies. Not as a permanent fixture.
>
> I can attest that figuring out why something isn't inferred @safe isn't
> always easy, and the "slap a @safe: tag at the top" isn't always going
> to help. But it can be a technique to find such things.

Yeah. It makes sense as a temporary solution to track down problems. It
makes a lot less sense as a way to write your code normally.

- Jonathan M Davis



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