CT regex in AA at compile time

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 1/7/20 11:00 AM, Taylor Hillegeist wrote:
> On Tuesday, 7 January 2020 at 15:51:21 UTC, MoonlightSentinel wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 7 January 2020 at 15:40:58 UTC, Taylor Hillegeist wrote:
>>> but I can't get it to work. it says its an Error: non-constant 
>>> expression.
>>>
>>> I imagine this has to do with the ctRegex template or something. 
>>> maybe there is a better way? Does anyone know?
>>
>> This issue is unrelated to ctRegex, AA literals are non-constant 
>> expressions (probably due to their implementation).

Correct. A compile-time AA is much different in implementation/layout 
than a runtime AA. So you can't initialize them at compile time.

> also, the solution you used is very cool. I had no idea you could put 
> shared static this()
> just anywhere and have it execute just like it was in main! Does this 
> work for dlls as well?

dlls run static constructors upon loading. Thought I'm not too familiar 
with how it exactly works, I know that there can be some trickiness when 
using dlls on Windows.

See information about static constructors/destructors here: 
https://dlang.org/spec/class.html#static-constructor

No idea why it's in the class section, potentially it was only for 
classes at one point?

Information about using DLLs in windows with D is here: 
https://wiki.dlang.org/Win32_DLLs_in_D

-Steve