C++17 cannot beat D surely

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, June 03, 2017 22:38:24 H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 03, 2017 at 03:00:56PM -0700, Ali Çehreli via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> > On 06/03/2017 12:12 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> > > I'd say this deserves a blog post but it would be too short.
> >
> > I made many good friends at C++Now. Some of them know Atila from
> > CppCon and other C++ conferences. (Beer involved. :) ) They told me
> > Atila would routinely tell them during C++ presentations "This
> > wouldn't be a talk at a DConf; it's a language feature in D." :)
>
> [...]
>
> In this case, I'd say "this wouldn't be an article about D; it's a
> language feature." :-D
>
> Though I'd say we *could* add meat to the article by explaining what
> exactly CTFE is, how it works, and why you could just call the standard
> library sort at compile-time and have it Just Work(tm) without having to
> jump through hoops.
>
> And perhaps demonstrate how easy it is to do this not just with sort,
> but with far more complex things.  In fact, significant chunks of Phobos
> are now available at CTFE.  For example, you can call std.format at
> compile-time to perform some pretty hairy string formatting and have the
> result baked into your executable so that you incur none of the cost of
> computing it at runtime.
>
> The best part of all this is, as long as you have already written
> runtime code that's CTFE-compatible, you don't have to do anything else
> to make it work at compile-time. No messing around with constexpr, no
> awkward special syntax, no need to jump through hoops, invoke arcane
> black magic, etc.. Just call the code with normal runtime syntax from an
> expression whose value needs to be known at compile-time, and the
> compiler does the rest of you.
>
> And if you need a particular functionality both at compile-time and
> during runtime, there's no need to write it twice in two different
> sublanguages. You just write one function once, and call it from both
> CTFE and at runtime. It Just Works(tm).
>
> Then we could add the icing on the cake by showing off one of
> Andrei's(?) little gems in std.random: a RNG generator that checks *at
> compile-time* whether a particular set of RNG parameters would produce a
> poor-quality RNG, and abort with a compile-error if so.  Meaning that if
> the thing compiles at all, you have a minimum quality guarantee. (This
> particular gem is described in detail in TDPL, btw, and is one of the
> things about D that blew me away when I first read it.)

Be careful, or Mike will start hounding you to write the actual article. ;)

- Jonathan M Davis