Compile-time AAs

[Don]

bearophile wrote:
> Don has recently said that adding dynamic arrays at compile-time looks easy. I'd also like to have compile-time associative arrays. So you can fill them inside a CT function (the compiler may try to do the same for AAs created inside a static this(){}), and save some run time.
> Even if such compile-time AAs have to be immutable at run-time they can be useful anyway.
> A smarter implementation of such CT AAs may even use a perfet hashing, to make them quite fast.

Indeed. I think perfect hashing is one of the primary appeals of a 
compile-time AA.

BTW, you can use AAs inside CTFE already. There's probably missing 
functionality, though -- create a Bugzilla test case for anything you 
find. The primary thing which is missing is that you can't use an AA 
literal to populate a runtime AA (this is a backend issue, not a CTFE 
limitation). You can get the AA keys and values as arrays, though, so 
you could populate the AA yourself.