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

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 1/18/23 8:51 PM, A moo person wrote:
> This is a semi rant born from frustration. Currently I'm trying to 
> figure out Mir Ion so I can serialize some data, and oh boy is it 
> frustrating.
> 
> The entire library is annotated out the wazoo with @safe and @nogc and 
> pure and inout. Its a serialization library so as you might imagine it's 
> doing reflection on types, calling member functions to try and serialize 
> stuff, things like that. I have spent hours now adding attributes and 
> casting attributes away. Writing @trusted wrapper types for std.algo 
> ranges. Trying to decipher the vomit that dmd gives when one the types 
> is not quite right. All I want to do is serialize a list of structs from 
> a range and be able to deserialize them back but I can't do that because 
> I still have not gotten it working.
> 
> It's actually maddening, I have spent 2 days on this. What value are all 
> these attributes adding? Because it's a useability nightmare. Every time 
> I encounter a D library that tries to be clever with these annotations, 
> it's just absolutely made things more complex and less useable. Same 
> story every time I have ever tried to use them in my own code.

Something like serialization/deserialization (which requires templates) 
should use attribute inference, and use unittests to prove memory 
safety/nogc/etc.

Now, this *can* break down if not explicit since the compiler sometimes 
gives up on inference, so maybe that's what happened here.

-Steve