Proposal: __traits(getComment, symbol)

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, August 28, 2019 2:51:24 AM MDT FeepingCreature via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> I propose a way to get the comment on a symbol at compile time. I
> believe this was already rejected, though I don't know why; I'd
> expect it to be something like "code should not change behavior
> due to a comment." I think that now that we have user-defined
> annotations there is a much lower risk of that.
>
> Why do I want this? Generating special documentation/annotated
> interfaces from D code is a *lot* easier if you can get the
> compiler to do your introspection work for you. I want to
> generate Swagger files documenting our REST services, and I want
> to use D comments to document them. Right now, I will have to do
> a weird hybrid dance where I generate the D type graph on the D
> side with compiletime introspection, output it to a file,
> simultaneously generate the Ddoc JSON file with -D -X to fish out
> the comments, then fuse the two together. There is no need for
> this, but for the absence of __traits(getComment).

I confess that I thought that there already was a trait for getting the ddoc
comment associated with a symbol, but looking at the documentation, that
doesn't appear to be the case.

- Jonathan M Davis