What are AST Macros?

[Rainer Deyke]

On 7/13/2010 01:03, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Rainer Deyke" <rainerd at eldwood.com> wrote in message 
> news:i1gs16$1oj3$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> The great strength of string mixins is that you can use them to add the
>> AST macros to D.  The great weakness of string mixins is that doing so
>> requires a full (and extendable) CTFE D parser, and that no such parser
>> is provided by Phobos.
> 
> Seems to me that would lead to unnecessary decreases in compilation 
> performance. Such as superfluous re-parsing. And depending how exactly DMD 
> does CTFE, a CTFE D parser could be slower than just simply having DMD do 
> the parsing directly.

True. I tend to ignore compile-time costs.  The performance of computers
is increasing exponentially.  The length of the average computer program
is more or less stable.  Therefore this particular problem will
eventually solve itself.

Of course, this is just my perspective as a developer who uses a
compiler maybe twenty times a day.  If I was writing my own compiler
which was going to be used thousands of times a day by thousands of
different developers, I'd have a different attitude.


-- 
Rainer Deyke - rainerd at eldwood.com