Debugging CTFE

[Don]

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
> "Matthias Walter" <Matthias.Walter at st.ovgu.de> wrote in message 
> news:g38na9$2gs7$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have written some compile time executable functions with D 1.0 which 
>> work in runtime but hang (and allocate memory without end) at 
>> compile-time. Is there a way to debug this further? Can one print stuff 
>> out? (Don't know if writefln works at compile-time, as I'm using Tango) 
>> Can I somehow get a stack trace of the functions called?
>>
> 
> No, no, and no.  CTFE support in the current frontend has some rather 
> unworkable disadvantages.  For one, it's terribly buggy.You're better off 
> trying to convert it to templates in most cases.

I disagree. I've not had much trouble with CTFE. The really, really nice 
thing about CTFE is that you can write it as a runtime function, and 
make sure it works before using it a compile time.

The problem with CTFE is bugzilla issue #1382 (no memory release for 
CTFE functions)...

For two, CTFE is
> interpreting a garbage-collected language but is not itself 
> garbage-collected, meaning that memory-unconscious code evaluated at compile 
> time (i.e. a loop that appends data to the end of a string) will just leak 
> like hell and cause the compiler to easily use up several GB of memory. 
> That might be what's happening to your code.

That's very likely. The maximum size of code you can write with CTFE is 
pretty small.

>  Or it could be a bug in CTFE. 

Bugzilla issue #1382 is the killer. One of the most important bugs in 
bugzilla, I reckon.