@ctfeonly

[Nicholas Wilson]

On Thursday, 7 December 2017 at 03:18:57 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> On Thursday, December 07, 2017 02:09:56 lobo via Digitalmars-d 
> wrote:
>> On Thursday, 7 December 2017 at 01:21:11 UTC, Nicholas Wilson
>>
>> wrote:
>> > I'd like to add an attribute to indicate that the annotated 
>> > function is only available at compile time so that in cases 
>> > where the operation is invalid at runtime (strings and 
>> > concatenation on a GPU for instance) but the result is only 
>> > used at compile time (for a mixin) the compiler is free to 
>> > not codegen that function.
>> >
>> > I can add this to LDC pretty easily, but does anyone else 
>> > have a use for this (e.g. shrinking binary sizes for mixin 
>> > heavy codebases) and would benefit having this as a standard 
>> > thing?
>>
>> Shouldn't the linker do this already?
>>
>> Once the compiler has CTFE'd the function any call in the code 
>> should be replaced with the function evaluation. The linker 
>> should then drop the code out of the binary because it really 
>> is dead code.
>

Unfortunately I don't have a linker to do that for me with 
DCompute.

> Regardless, needing something like an attribute to tell the 
> compiler to strip stuff out of the binary seems like a hack to 
> me. It may actually be necessary in some cases, but it just 
> feels like it should be unnecessary.

Do you have any other ideas about how to achieve this other than 
an attribute?
Having an attribute seems the most simple and straightforward.