DConf 2014 Day 1 Talk 4: Inside the Regular Expressions in D by Dmitry Olshansky

[Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Wednesday, 11 June 2014 at 18:03:06 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
> I wish I'd taken the mic at the end, and 2 days later Adam D. 
> Ruppe said what I was thinking of saying: unit test and debug 
> the CTFE function at runtime and then use it at compile-time 
> when it's ready for production.

Aye. It wasn't long ago that this wasn't really possible because 
of how incomplete and buggy CTFE was, you kinda had to do it with 
special code, but now so much of the language works, there's a 
good chance if it works at runtime it will work at compile time 
too.

I was really surprised with CTFE a few months ago when I tried to 
use my dom.d with it... and it actually worked. That's amazing to 
me.

But anyway, in general, the ctfe mixin stuff could be replaced 
with an external code generator, so yeah that's the way I write 
them now - as a code generator standalone thing then go back and 
enum it to actually use. (BTW I also like to generate fairly 
pretty code, e.g. indentend properly, just because it makes it 
easier to read.)

> Yes, Dmitry brought up compiler bugs. But if you write a 
> compile-time UT and it fails, you'll know it wasn't because of 
> your own code because the run-time ones still pass.

Yeah, good point too.