Another serialization topic, reduced scope

[Gregor Mückl]

On Wednesday, 11 December 2019 at 18:53:56 UTC, Jacob Carlborg 
wrote:
> On 2019-12-08 09:22, Tobias Pankrath wrote:
>
>> This should have a place in phobos, because it makes 
>> interoperability across libraries easier.
>
> No, it should be in druntime. Then it's possible to attach the 
> UDA's to symbols both in Phobos and druntime. For example, 
> adding @ignore to Thread.

This points me in a completely different direction: you can't 
annotate 3rd party libraries with annotations that these 
libraries are unaware of.

I worked on a expansive C# project at one time where a 3rd party 
GUI control was extracting info about presentation of properties 
from attributes via reflection. The classes I had to feed into it 
were data model classes that couldn't depend on the GUI. The 
resulting code bent over backwards to inject the required 
attributes at runtime based on a separately maintained database 
that covered thousands of properties. I'm still amazed that this 
worked. The main issue was keeping the database in sync with the 
model code. Compile time checks on the consistency of these 
external attributes would have been great.