Is @safe still a work-in-progress?

[Mike Franklin]

On Tuesday, 21 August 2018 at 21:17:25 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:

> I don't have merge rights. I took a look anyway and it mostly 
> looks ok, but I'm not familiar enough with that part of the 
> codebase.

It's not the implementation that's preventing it from being 
merged.  It's the idea itself, weak rationale, lack of peer 
review, lack of consideration for alternatives, and lack of 
documentation supporting it.  It reeks of "designed on a whim to 
quickly patch some oversight in the design DIP1000 while trying 
to get Phobos to compile with -dip1000".

With the proposed idea, order of parameters matters.  We'll need 
to establish a convention that return parameters must be declared 
first, which is opposite of 
https://dlang.org/phobos/std_algorithm_mutation.html#copy. Is 
that a good idea?  Maybe it is. We haven't vetted the design yet, 
so I'm not sure.  Why haven't we vetted the design?  Because 
there currently isn't one; there's just an informal 
back-of-the-napkin memo uploaded to a bugzilla entry.

The proposed idea wants to make the first parameter, if it's 
`ref`, special. Why not the first `ref` parameter regardless of 
whether it's the absolute first in the list.  Why not the last 
`ref` parameter?  Why not all `ref` parameters?

But what bothers me the most is I think it's missing the bigger 
picture:  D needs a way to annotate lifetimes.  Maybe `scope` and 
`return` with weird conditions based on the order of parameters 
and their attributes are the way to go.  Maybe there's another 
way that hasn't yet been considered.

Put together a thorough description of the proposal, justify it, 
ask the larger community for comment, vet it, and document it.  
At least that's what it's going to take to get me to take action 
on the PR.

Or maybe someone else is willing to just rubber stamp it in the 
interest of expediency.

Mike