EWG forwarded a resolution to issue 2538 (Can standard attributes be
syntactically ignored?) to core as a resolution for GB-055 that is up
for plenary vote today.

As mentioned on the reflectors and during the EWG discussions of this,
there is sustained implementer opposition to adopting this resolution.
At least one C++ implementation (Clang) has stated that we are
unlikely to implement this proposal as a matter of practicality --
over the past ten years we've added support for over 400 attributes
under the model of syntactic ignorability and changing our
implementation strategy at this point would incur significant risk for
extremely marginal benefit.

We are also concerned that EWG did not adequately consider the C and
C++ compatibility issues adopting this proposal will introduce given
that attributes predominately appear in header files. WG14 spent about
three years considering this feature aiming to be compatible with C++
and concluded that "ignored" meant syntactic ignorability. This
property was critical for at least some C implementations as well.
While there is time for NB comments against C to change the
specification, we do not think it is prudent to expect WG14 to change
direction without stronger motivation.

Further, we are not convinced the effects of this paper are in the
best interests of users. The result of voting in favor of this
proposal is for this code to be diagnosed in C++11 mode:

[[deprecated("this has a reason")]] int foo;
[[nodiscard("this also has a reason")]] int func();

because this proposes, as a DR, to require an implementation to
diagnose the syntactic violation of providing an attribute argument
list when the grammar does not allow one for these attributes in that
language mode.

Adopting a proposal aiming to improve code portability when there are
expected implementer vetoes and a known incompatibility with C and
previous versions of C++ does not seem like it will achieve the goal
of improving code portability. As such, we recommend rejecting this
proposal during plenary.

~Aaron