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by Cloudef 417 days ago
The zig community cares about compilation speed. Unrestricted comptime would be quite disasterous for that.
1 comments

I feel that's such a red herring.

You can @setEvalBranchQuota essentially as big as you want, @embedFile an XML file, comptime parse it and generate types based on that (BTDT). You can slow down compilation as much as you want to already. Unrestricting the expressiveness of comptime has as much to do with compile times, as much as the restricted amount, and perceived entanglement of zig build and build.zig has to do with compile times.

The knife about unrestricted / restricted comptime cuts both ways. Have you considered stopping using comptime and generate strings for cachable consumption of portable zig code for all the currently supported comptime use-cases right now? Why wouldn't you? What is it that you feel is more apt to be done at comptime? Can you accept that others see other use-cases that don't align with andrewrk's (current) vision? If I need to update a slow generation at 'project buildtime' your 'compilation speed' argument tanks as well. It's the problem space that dictates the minimal/optimal solution, not the programming language designer's headspace.