On Sat, Jul 13, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Ary Borenszweig <a...@esperanto.org.ar>wrote:
> On 7/12/13 5:42 PM, Tofu Ninja wrote: > >> So I had an idea recently, wouldn't it be cool to have the ability to >> call an executable at compile time and capture its output. Something >> like the string imports but instead of opening and reading a text file, >> it run an executable, waits for it to finish, and grabs its output. >> >> It would get really cool if you could pass this executable some args and >> then mix in its out put into your own code. It could be used similarly >> to how CTFE are used but with out the overhead of trying to compile that >> function and what not and with out the limitations on what it can do. >> >> I could imagine all sorts of things that would be possible with this >> that is currently not. >> >> Not sure if this is something that could be implemented easily, but >> seems like something that could be done and something that would be >> really cool. >> > > What would actually be cool is to run any kind of code at compile time > (within a sandbox, if you want). For example reading a mysql database and > generating classes for the tables at compile time. No need to run a > separate executable and remember to run it before compiling your program. > > But this has been discussed many times in this list, and it won't happen, > because compile time functions are not jitted and run, they are just > interpreted. > > You ask for executing a program at compile time. Somebody will ask reading > a file at compile time. Another one will ask reading a schema from a > database. Yet another will want to do a web scraper at compile time to > generate efficient code from that (not sure that's useful :-P) > reading a file at compile time is already possible with string import.
