[tryfinally]

It’s an extraordinary feature that is only intended for optimization of edge cases. Making the feature verbose and somewhat ugly to use seems like an intentional choice. This way if a beginner comes across this “confusing/weird looking” code they can look up the attribute and see what it does, whereas a more convenient/native syntax would be less recognizable and noticeable. This is similar to the idea that you should make ugly APIs ugly to use (to avoid giving users a false sense of security).

[nick_]

But we can already do `Span<int> ints = stackalloc int[5];` without using `unsafe`. The array size doesn't even have to be const in that example. They could have just made an optimization when a const is supplied for locals, and then use the existing fixed array syntax for members.

It seems to me the budget for C# lang dev is way down. This seems like it was implemented this way so they didn't have to change many internals.

[pjmlp]

Swift, Nim , D and others are able to offer similar capabilities without being such a hack, rather a proper designed language feature.