Another way to do CTFE

[Araq via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 17 June 2014 at 19:41:59 UTC, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
> CTFE is really nice but has its limitations: you can't do 
> anything you want, and since it's interpreted it requires an 
> interpreter and it's generally slow. Nimrod does the same 
> thing, and now they are implementing a VM to run the 
> interpreted code faster. Is this really the way to go?
>

For your information the new VM shipped with 0.9.4 and runs
Nimrod code faster at compile-time than Python runs code at
run-time in the tests that I did with it. :-) That said, it
turned out to be much harder to implement than I thought and I
wouldn't do it again.

> ...
> The compiler could be smart and cache the executable so that 
> anytime it has to expand it it just needs to invoke it (skip 
> the compile phase).
>
> What do you think?
>

It is a *very* good idea and this is exactly the way I would do
it now. However, you usually only trade one set of problems for
another. (For instance, giving Nimrod an 'eval' module is now
quite easy to do...)