I am very happy that in 0.7 the expression a.b lowers to an overloadable function. But I am a bit surprised that it lowers to Base.getproperty(a, :b) and not Base.getproperty(a, Val{:b}). It seems that the latter would be much better for taking advantage of Julia’s powerful dispatch. In the PR that introduced the new lowering, @kristoffer.carlssonmakes a similar point and @jeff.bezansonacknowledges the possibility of using Val{:b}, but it seems the discussion of this particular point went no further.
The feature came combined with compiler enhancements that made it possible for it to properly infer getproperty(a, :b) (as long as the field argument is constant). Val{:b} would force method specialization that is generally not desired here. Of course it is always possible to implement getproperty(a::MyType, b::Symbol) = getproperty(a, Val{b}()) if you want that for some reason.
Why do you say that specialization is generally undesired? From a programming perspective, I think I would almost always want different methods for different properties. And in the rare case I didn’t it would be easy to forward to a common method.
I think specialisation is unwanted from a compiler standpoint - not from the user perspective.
We already have compile time problems in Julia and specialisation is expensive. Making a much used feature like getfield heavily specialize on a symbol would add a lot of compilation overhead.
That makes sense. Now that I know there is a good reason for using symbols, and that doing so will not incur a dispatch overhead, I am content to use the workaround suggested by @Keno for those types whose properties I want to specialize.