[moomin]

But comptime is kind of LISP's unique feature, it's just called macros.

EDIT: In fairness, Zig's presentation is pretty likeable. You can do a comptime expression pretty trivially in LISP, a comptime parameter or block would require actual effort.

[patrec]

No. There is a real difference between staged computation of the type that zig has and macros in common lisp, scheme/rust have (so much for lisp's uniqueness BTW). In common lisp you can do completely arbitrary computation at compile- (or read-)time in zig you cannot and crucially you are also not responsible for manually ordering the "stages". E.g. in common lisp you have use eval-when to make sure that stuff is available at the right phase, whereas zig works out the dependency for you.

[creata]

Can you please provide an example of Zig "working out the dependency"? I'm struggling to make sense of your comment.

[patrec]

I could write a concrete example that will work in zig and fail in common lisp, but maybe this link is enough?

https://ziglang.org/#Order-independent-top-level-declaration...

[creata]

Oh, so is the point that in Zig, functions with comptime parameters are more or less identical to regular functions in that regard?

[dnautics]

Exactly. You can also use non-comptime functions in comptime, if it avoids certain types of stateful behaviour.

[dinglejungle]

An example of this in the Zig math tests, where it tests calling the same function at both comptime and runtime: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/33c4ad7f3a79aad5d7ea481a...