running code at compile time macro

[andrewrk]

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[andrewrk]

This idea was inspired by Jonathan Blow's language but I'm fairly confident in my decision now that we will not have a macro to run code at compile time.

Instead, Zig will have a build.zig file which replaces configure / cmake / gyp / ninja / make etc. This file is executed at compile time and creates the build description. Where in most projects the thing you do is configure, make, make install, with zig projects it will be:

zig build [args] (executes build.zig)
zig build --install [args] (again executes build.zig)

build.zig will import a library to assist in common tasks such as building zig executables, libraries, and shared objects. The library will also assist in other common tasks such as building C/C++ code and executing arbitrary commands.

So if you wanted to run code at compile time, no problem, just have build.zig import that code, run it, potentially save the output to another .zig file, and then import that in your other file.