[Issue 1475] allow to use intrinsic math functions (e.g. trigonometry) in CTFEs

[Bill Baxter]

BCS wrote:
> d-bugmail at puremagic.com wrote:
>> http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1475
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------- Comment #2 from wbaxter at gmail.com  2007-09-05 16:10 -------
>> Of course you can already do this by writing your own CTFE functions to
>> approximate those via Taylor series and the like.  One of the first 
>> CTFE demos
>> was a compile-time sqrt function.
>>
>> But yeh, the compiler has access to a better way to evaluate those 
>> functions
>> than running what amounts to an interpreted language, so it would be 
>> nice to be
>> able to access it.  I can imagine some sort of plugin system where 
>> you'd write
>> some D-code, compile it to a dll, and expose new compile-time 
>> functions to the
>> compiler via that dll (much as you write extensions for other scripting
>> languages).  And of course those initial CTFE compiler extensions 
>> could be used
>> to compile further CTFE compiler extensions... and so on.
>>
>>
> 
> As long as you aren't cross compiling, The compiler could take the 
> version of the function it's going to put in the obj, plop it down in 
> memory and run it. Why use DLLs?

Sure, implementation detail.  :-)
There might be some value in having such CTFE libraries be 
redistributable though?  Probably gets in to security risk territory, 
though.

--bb