On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 08:00:53PM -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: [...] > Yah, I think we need something like that in the stdlib. Also, we need > writefln with compile-time format string (someone was working on it > but I haven't heard about it in a while). -- Andrei
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13568 I wanted to work on it, but haven't actually gotten to it yet. Basically, the idea is relatively simple: // compile-time variant void writefln(string format="", A...)(A args) if (format.length > 0) { ... // implementation here } // runtime variant void writefln(string format="", A...)(A args) if (format.length == 0 && args.length > 0 && is(typeof(args[0]) == string)) { ... // current implementation } This will allow backward compatibility with the current writefln API, while allowing existing code to simply transition from: writefln("...", ...); to: writefln!"..."(...); The tricky part is how to extricate the various parts of the current implementation in order to take full advantage of compile-time format strings, e.g., (1) don't import anything except what's necessary to format the current format string (the current format() has to import, e.g., std.bigint even if you never use BigInt, because it can't assume that a runtime format string might not ask to format BigInts; this causes the infamous format() template bloat) -- this includes allowing format() to be pure, @nogc, etc. if your format strings never ask for anything that requires that; (2) compile-time argument mismatch checking (e.g., writefln!"%d"("abc") should give a compile-time error rather than a runtime exception). A lot of the current implementation will probably have to be overhauled / rewritten in order to make this work. That part unfortunately requires a lot of time, which I don't have right now. T -- Creativity is not an excuse for sloppiness.
