[wvenable]

This isn't an article about creating or even using attributes; it's a fairly low-level deep dive into how they're implemented.

It's definitely nothing I've ever had to think about when using attributes but I can appreciate someone looking into this and making the case that they could be implemented better.

As for attributes themselves, what I've found is that languages without this facility tend to implement them anyway using whatever hacks they can. In C, this is typically done with macros defining constant values. In scripting languages, it's often done with comments.