On Wednesday, 28 September 2016 at 16:20:18 UTC, Eyal Lotem wrote:
[...]
I would just make opApply a templated function, for the following reasons:
1) You are saying that having this feature in the language would spare some template instantiations and code generations; but a good compiler should be able to recognize functions with the same code and fold them; for example, if a function takes a generic pointer, chances are it doesn't need to be duplicated for every pointer type.
2) It is actually not true that attributes are only for type checking; the compiler can use them to generate different code: a nothrow function does not need machinery to forward exceptions and clean the stack, for example; so templates are the correct way here, because they can generate different code when needed and also be folded to a single codegen if possible.
