Compile time executable calling?

[Timothee Cour]

On Sat, Jul 13, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Ary Borenszweig <ary at 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.
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