On Tuesday, 26 May 2020 at 17:50:58 UTC, Gregory wrote:
Which will just lead people to pure @trusted: at the top of their code to get it to compile again, with or without extern(C) being @safe by default. Then someone that uses it as dependency will mistaken think it is @safe. What's to stop this kind of "greenwashing" and why is greenwashing only important to prevent when talking about extern(C) but every other code that will break from this change?
The reason extern function declarations are particularly problematic is that changing them from @system-by-default to @safe-by-default can cause *silent* breakage in existing, correct code. By "silent", I mean that there is no message from the compiler warning you that the memory safety of the code has been compromised. It will still compile, and you will only find out that something has gone wrong when you run into memory corruption at run-time.
This undermines the entire purpose of @safe, which is to automatically catch code with potential memory errors at compile time.
