On Tue, 10 Feb 2026 at 18:25, Barry Revzin via Std-Proposals
<std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> As I wrote in my blog (https://brevzin.github.io/c++/2025/03/25/attributes/), a solution that would actually be useful here would be allow users to explicitly declare attributes they want "ignored" - which still isn't ignoring attributes (a design strategy that has clear negative value), simply explicitly declaring them to be no-ops. That would still require the preprocessor stuff, but only once per attribute, and the usage would have the good, macro-free syntax.
>
> Attributes are a great feature for adding new functionality without having to introduce new (uglier) keywords or grammar.
>
> Or, at least, they could be, if we just stop pre-emptively crippling them and pretending they're glorified comments.


Attributes could be creater if they were declared before being used,
and that declaration could then declare whether the attribute is
ignorable.
An implementation could then warn on that declaration if it doesn't
implement a particular non-ignorable attribute, and reject the program
on use of such an attribute.

I and other people don't agree with attributes being a great feature
to use for adding new functionality. Especially because of the
accidental ignoring part in cases where the program does the wrong
thing if an attribute is ignored.