Maybe another way to do compile time rewrites

[Tofu Ninja via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 21 June 2014 at 04:34:50 UTC, aaaaa wrote:
> Currently what happens is you do
>
> dmd program1.d
>
> and program1.d uses mixin and compile time reflections to 
> internally rewrite itself to be effectively program2.d so
>
> dmd program1.d
>
> and
>
> dmd program2.d
>
> are the same.
>
> However another possible way might be
>
> rdmd program3.d > program2.d
> dmd program2.d
>
> That is, program3.d would (at runtime) generate program2.d 
> which you can then compile. This has the advantage of being 
> possibly faster and simpler, because you don't have to do 
> everything at compile time. Recent talks have lamented at the 
> limited tools available for compile time debugging and if you 
> generate the code at runtime, you have access to all the 
> runtime facilities for debugging code. This also removes the 
> restriction of not being able to do system calls during compile 
> time because you can do whatever you want during the runtime of 
> program3.d
>
> I have no idea how much more complex this would be and am just 
> thinking out loud. Anyway, thanks everyone for developing and 
> maintaining D!

If that was as effective as doing it at compile time, then any 
language could do it and we would have never needed/wanted all 
the compile time features that we have now.