Things Zig comptime won't do

zig's comptime has some (objectively: debatable? subjectively: definite) shortcomings that the zig community then overcomes with zig build to generate code-as-strings to be lateron @imported and compiled.

Practically, "zig build"-time-eval. As such there's another 'comptime' stage with more freedom, unlimited run-time (no @setEvalBranchQuota), can do IO (DB schema, network lookups, etc.) but you lose the freedom to generate zig types as values in the current compilation; instead of that you of course have the freedom to reduce->project from target compiled semantic back to input syntax down to string to enter your future compilation context again.

Back in the day, where I had to glue perl and tcl via C at one point in time, passing strings for perl generated through tcl is what this whole thing reminds me of. Sure it works. I'm not happy about it. There's _another_ "macro" stage that you can't even see in your code (it's just @import).

The zig community bewilders me at times with their love for lashing themselves. The sort of discussions which new sort of self-harm they'd love to enforce on everybody is borderline disturbing.

> The zig community bewilders me at times with their love for lashing themselves. The sort of discussions which new sort of self-harm they'd love to enforce on everybody is borderline disturbing.

Personally, I find the idea that a compiler might be able to reach outside itself completely terrifying (Access the network or a database? Are you nuts?).

That should be 100% the job of a build system.

Now, you can certainly argue that generating a text file may or may not be the best way to reify the result back into the compiler. However, what the compiler gets and generates should be completely deterministic.