Feedback Thread: DIP 1028--Make @safe the Default--Final Review

[Dukc]

On Wednesday, 25 March 2020 at 07:03:16 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> [snip]

There is still this issue, that was brought up at previous review 
also:

Consider large amounts of legacy code modules that mix a lot of 
templated and non-templated functions. Majority of the 
non-templated functions are not `@safe`, but a many templates 
rely on inferring safety based on their arguments. The code is 
already tested to be reliable, and refactoring it to be @safe 
would not be worth it.

This DIP, as it currently stands, would force the maintainers to 
add `@system` function by function to the codebase, which can be 
somewhat large effort. If the maintainers could just add 
`@system:` to top of each module, the migration effort would be 
greatly reduced. However, they can't because they rely on the 
templates in the modules inferring `@safe` based on the arguments.

I recommend that the DIP proposes to avoid this problem somehow. 
One possibility is proposing an alternative to `@system:` that 
does not apply to templates. Another is proposing that by 
default, regular functions would have their safety inferred the 
same way it's inferred for templated functions (thanks to 
Vladimir Panteleev for this idea -wouldn't have occured to me).