Nim Nuggets: Nim talk at Strange Loop 2021

[Imperatorn]

On Sunday, 17 October 2021 at 08:15:26 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 10/16/2021 11:05 PM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> On Sunday, 17 October 2021 at 04:17:38 UTC, jfondren wrote:
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2VRuZo2pdA
>>>
>>> About 50% of it is inadvertent praise for D. The rest is ARC 
>>> and C++ interop.
>> 
>> If you mean compile time evaluation, D wasn't the first with 
>> such features and it is quite far from what Common Lisp is 
>> capable of.
>
> Lisp is fundamentally different. It started out as an 
> interpreter and later added native code generation. There never 
> really was a difference between compile time and runtime for 
> Lisp.
>
> Nobody even thought of compile time function evaluation for C 
> and C++ until D did it.
>
> Nobody.
>
> As evidence, when people discovered that C++ templates could be 
> used to evaluate things at compile time, everyone was 
> completely agog over it. I never heard *anyone* suggest that 
> maybe ordinary functions could do this, too.
>
> Now everyone does it. Even C is considering adding it.

And still, in 2021 using C++20, compile time features are 
severely crippled.

I tried just some days ago doing some simple math pow stuff and 
the answer I got from the C++ community was "eh, well you'd have 
to use a constexpr compatible library for that"