Is D suitable for my latest project?

[Atila Neves via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Sunday, 6 September 2015 at 14:36:53 UTC, chris stevens wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I am considering using D for my latest project and there are a 
> few features I would like and am not entirely sure at this 
> point whether D has them. They are:
>
> - dynamic creation of classes/structs at runtime (think I can 
> emulate this with variants/dynamic)

At runtime, no. However... if it doesn't actually need to be 
runtime and is in the code itself you can have code be generated 
at compile time.

> - dynamic compilation of code files at runtime

Only by running a compiler. But as above, if it doesn't strictly 
have to be at runtime and everything is specified in the source 
files, you can compute strings at compile-time and mix them in to 
generate code.

> - some basic code creation tools

mixin, template mixin, CTFE.

> Are the above possible?

It really depends on what you want to do. A lot of the dynamic 
code generation that goes on is done at runtime because that's 
what other languages support. In my experience a lot of those 
use-cases can be done at compile-time in D. A famous example is 
compile-time regular expressions. Unless you're writing a tool 
similar to grep, all regexes in your program are known at 
compile-time. They don't _need_ to be parsed/interpreted/compiled 
at run-time, that's just what every other language that isn't D 
does.

So, if your use-case depends on information from the file-system, 
user interaction, networking, etc. then your only choice is to 
generate text files with D code and compile it. If, on the other 
hand, it's all defined by the code you write, then D has 
excellent compile-time code generation tools at your disposal.

Atila