I was recently looking through the standard library and saw the annotation -> ! in some procedures. I did not find any mention of this in the documentation… What does it mean?
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This marks a procedure as being divergent or having a diverging call, which is to say that it does not return. For example, panic is divergent and so is libc.exit. You can find the word diverging in the compiler to refer to this, and divergent appears once in the docs of core:c/libc:
| `<stdnoreturn.h>` | Not applicable, use Odin's divergent return `!` |
It’s not a largely documented feature since it’s not often we write divergent procedures.
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Well, then I guessed right, thanks for your reply!
In my opinion, it really needs to be mentioned in the documentation.
If you put defer statement and divergent proc in a same block, the compiler warn you that the defer statement will never executed.
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