Andrei's list of barriers to D adoption

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, June 07, 2016 18:33:01 Dave via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Tuesday, 7 June 2016 at 18:24:33 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> > On 6/7/2016 11:19 AM, Jack Stouffer wrote:
> >> On Tuesday, 7 June 2016 at 18:15:28 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> >>> [...]
> >>
> >> But you can't grep for @system because 99% of the time it's
> >> implicit. This
> >> problem becomes harder to find when using templates for
> >> everything, which I do.
> >
> > Add:
> >    @safe:
> > at the top of your D module and you'll find the @system code.
> > The D compiler is the static analysis tool. It's true that
> > @safe should have been the default, but too much code would
> > break if that were changed. Adding one line to the top of a
> > module is very doable for those that are desirous of adding the
> > safety checks.
> >
> > You can also add:
> >    @nogc:
> > at the top, too. It isn't necessary to tediously annotate every
> > function.
>
> Seems fair. But perhaps phobos should also follow this standard?
> Which might be why people get the mindset that they have to
> annotate everything...

IMHO, it's bad practice to mass apply attributes with labels or blocks. It's
far too easy to accidentally mark a function with an attribute that you
didn't mean to, and it makes it way harder to figure out which attributes
actually apply to a function. And when you add templates into the mix,
applying attributes en masse doesn't work anyway, because pretty much the
only time that you want to mark a template function with an attribute is
when the template arguments have nothing to do with whether the attribute is
appropriate or not.

So, while mass applying something like @safe temporarily to check stuff
makes some sense, I really don't think that it's a good idea to do it in any
code that you'd ever commit.

- Jonathan M Davis