Template version of ANSI color code lib useful?

[Petar]

On Saturday, 14 October 2017 at 14:35:53 UTC, Shriramana Sharma 
wrote:
> Hello. I prepared a utility/library to output ANSI escape codes 
> for terminal text attributes with capabilities as advertised at 
> https://sites.google.com/site/jamadagni/files/temp/textattr-usage.html. (AFAIK this set of capabilities does not exist already in any existing package.)
>
> This was first written in D and ported with much effort to C. 
> This is the utility/library I refer to at 
> http://forum.dlang.org/post/n6362a$1t7u$1@digitalmars.com.
>
> Now I would prefer to keep the single C source and just write a 
> thin D wrapper to call the C library because C is also callable 
> from many other languages (and people can write wrappers for 
> their favourite one).
>
> However the only disadvantage (as discussed in the above 
> thread) is that the C library function is not CTFE-able in D 
> and thus I cannot write a D template in the wrapper to evaluate 
> the colour codes at compile time.
>
> On the other hand, I am not sure whether it is really useful to 
> evaluate colour codes at compile time because it is tantamount 
> to hardcoding them, and this means that any program using the 
> library is not able to switch off colour output at will if 
> stdout is not connected to a terminal.
>
> If the library is only called at runtime, I am able to add a 
> boolean switch to just make the library always output an empty 
> string for all calls effectively switching off colour code 
> output which is useful when stdout is not a terminal.
>
> My question: do people agree that there is not much point in 
> enabling CTFE of colour codes?

Why not simply add extern (C) wrappers for your D code? I see no 
point of using C, unless you want to be portable to arcane 
architectures.
With this approach you'll have both the portability of C and the 
advantages of using D.