On Tuesday, 18 December 2012 at 15:19:58 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
Should we take this as an opportunity for other compiler
maintainers to implement their own compiler-specific predefined
attributes?
Please, no!
Suppose GDC implements @noreturn (or whatever other attribute)
Later, LDC implements @noreturn separately with slightly
different semantics.
We now end up in a situation where @noreturn cannot be used
portably, and neither compiler developer has incentive to change
(whoever changes breaks their users code).
To make matters worse, due to the lack of preprocessor in D,
there's no easy way to work around it (mixins work, but are quite
ugly).
Finally, if we want to add @noreturn to the spec then it will be
forced to match the behaviour of the compilers than jumped the
gun (if you don't then you force those compilers to change their
implementations to match the spec, breaking their users code that
already depends on it).
If you do want to add your own attributes then please use names
like __noreturn, or even __gdc_noreturn so that you don't prevent
standardised usages being added to the spec.
