[lasagnaphil]

Although I understand people want to do some crazy stuff with template metaprogramming, I’m more concerned with how it will affect build times (you’re basically running a tree-walk interpreter in a compiler that was not supposed to run a turing complete language... it’s going to be very slow.)

For more practical reasons, what about just using runtime interned strings? Each unique string is hashed and allocated in heap memory only once, and to compare the strings you just compare the hashed values (which is just uint_64 comparison). Then you can easily use switch statements to compare your strings... As for performance, interning has an initial runtime cost for each string, but it will probably be miniscule compared to the massive compile time cost induced by crazy constexpr stuff.

Example of a string interning library:

https://github.com/mattiasgustavsson/libs/blob/master/docs/s...