On Saturday, 21 June 2014 at 04:34:50 UTC, aaaaa wrote:
Currently what happens is you do
dmd program1.d
and program1.d uses mixin and compile time reflections to
internally rewrite itself to be effectively program2.d so
dmd program1.d
and
dmd program2.d
are the same.
However another possible way might be
rdmd program3.d > program2.d
dmd program2.d
That is, program3.d would (at runtime) generate program2.d
which you can then compile. This has the advantage of being
possibly faster and simpler, because you don't have to do
everything at compile time. Recent talks have lamented at the
limited tools available for compile time debugging and if you
generate the code at runtime, you have access to all the
runtime facilities for debugging code. This also removes the
restriction of not being able to do system calls during compile
time because you can do whatever you want during the runtime of
program3.d
I have no idea how much more complex this would be and am just
thinking out loud. Anyway, thanks everyone for developing and
maintaining D!
If that was as effective as doing it at compile time, then any
language could do it and we would have never needed/wanted all
the compile time features that we have now.
