Line control macros

[PaulBatchelor]

I'm not a Zig user (yet), but I was wondering if Zig had anything similar to the line control macros that you see in GCC. I am very interested in using writing programs in Zig using my literate programming environment, which utilize these macros to make debugging possible.

Many thanks!

[thejoshwolfe]

Line control macros do not exist in Zig. There is no current plan to implement them, but there probably should be.

The line control macros should probably be in Zig comments, rather than being "macros" (which Zig doesn't have), keywords and first-class syntactic constructs, or a builtin functions. They are not necessary to understand the semantics of the Zig code, and so they would fit nicely into comments for tools that don't care about reading them.

Line control macros can be generalized into source maps. I don't exactly know what information source maps contain, but I expect they can contain details at a higher resolution than line numbers. That may be a better idea than just line control macros.