another properties thread

Moth postmaster at gmail.com
Thu Apr 22 02:25:29 UTC 2021


hello all. it's been a little while.
last year i found that the D spec concerning @property is in 
limbo, with the [official 
documentation](https://dlang.org/spec/function.html#property-functions) recommending against its use for almost three years at this point.

this was an upset, but dealable - it was ugly and long-winded, 
but i could work around the limitation by using manual getter and 
setter methods.

however, recently i discovered that the implementation of the 
bitfields template - the use of which is [stated to be a best 
practice by the 
documentation](https://dlang.org/spec/struct.html) - also [uses 
@property](https://github.com/dlang/phobos/blob/master/std/bitmanip.d#L114) in the code it generates.

this concerns me greatly. surely the standard library should be 
stable, not using half-implemented features that may be removed 
in the future - should i stop using bitfields? i've read 
elsewhere on this forum that the maintainers don't see @property 
as important, but this seems rather critical to me - is there 
likely to be any change in their stance on the issue? i would 
much, *much* rather use @property than not.

i hope i have not caused any offense with this post, but this 
situation really is frustrating, and i wanted to get it off my 
chest.


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