DIP81: Writing files at compile time

[Tofu Ninja via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 12 August 2015 at 18:37:40 UTC, JDemler wrote:
> Triggered by the original forum thread I wrote a DIP to further 
> explain the idea of the writing files at compile time feature 
> and its implications.
>
> http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP81
>
> Please discuss!

The benefits of this I see are debugging, actually having the 
generated files makes it much simpler to see what is going wrong. 
Otherwise the utility of this can be achieved with string mixins.

A simple alternative to this would be a flag to the compiler to 
expand mixins and output the new files. This would also be great 
for tooling, an IDE could use this and allow you to expand a 
mixin in place to see what it looks like. And currently all the 
auto complete engines I have seen for D don't handle mixins very 
well. Expanding them would make autocompletion a simpler job.