[pron]

The beauty of comptime is that, unlike with macros, you don't need to think on two levels. The semantics is the same as if everything were done at runtime. To read a comptime function you can completely ignore the distinction between compilation time and runtime. To write it you need to know that some operations are only available at compile-time.

See my comment here about "Zig' ": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24293611

Perhaps now you see what I meant when I said that Zig's simplicity hides its radical design.

[mratsim]

In Nim the equivalent is using a `static:` block, then everything inside has normal Nim syntax but evaluated at compile-time.

You can also do `const a = static(foo(x, y, z))` to force normal function to be evaluated at compile-time and store them in a constants.

Hence you don't need to use macros for compile-time evaluation in Nim just like in Zig. However macros are necessary for AST manipulation.