Could those be specified in comments in the file? Most development nowdays is done in an IDE that could intelligently "hide" the comments when you're just readi

Could those be specified in comments in the file? Most development nowdays is done in an IDE that could intelligently "hide" the comments when you're just reading the code, and then when you're looking at optimizing the code you could start annotating things that way. A similar approach is to use #pragma directives, though many languages do not have an analogue to that. Java Annotations are probably wrong. The compiler can benefit from more freedom (and finer grained detail), so for Java comments seem like a better choice to me.