Trying to use Mir ion, its a perfect example of the failure of D's attribute system

[Paul Backus]

On Thursday, 19 January 2023 at 04:06:27 UTC, A moo person wrote:
> If the argument is that the library should have been designed 
> to infer the annotations, then why even have the annotations in 
> the language at all if the best practice is to infer them.

In principle, the annotations are there mainly for (a) cases 
where attributes can't be inferred (e.g., extern functions), and 
(b) cases where you want to override attribute inference (e.g., 
@trusted).

Unfortunately, the compiler does not do as much inference as it 
could (e.g., it does not do inference for most ordinary 
non-template functions), which leads some D programmers to adopt 
the habit of sprinkling 'pure @safe nothrow @nogc' (or similar) 
all over their code as a precautionary measure. It seems like 
this is more or less what the Mir developers have done.

This is, ultimately, a usability problem with the 
language--sometimes it's best practice to write out the 
attributes by hand, other times it's a code smell, and if a 
library author doesn't know which is which, their users will 
suffer for it.

In the long run, I hope that we can address this by allowing the 
compiler to infer attributes for more functions; in the short 
run, the best we can do is try to fix the affected libraries.