Comptime: Scott Redig
Programming has obvious abilities to increase productivity through automated manipulation of data. Metaprogramming allows code to be treated as data, turning programming’s power back onto itself. Programming close to the metal has perhaps the most to gain from metaprogramming as high level concepts need to be mapped precisely to low level operations. Yet outside of functional languages I’ve always found the metaprogramming story to be a disappointment. So when I saw that Zig lists metaprogramming as a major feature, I took interest.
Honestly, my first experience writing something using Zig’s comptime were pretty rough. The concepts seemed foreign, and figuring out how to achieve the outcome I wanted was difficult. Then with a perspective shift, everything clicked and suddenly I loved it. To help speed you along that path of discovery, presented below are 6 different “views” of comptime. Each view focuses on a different way you can translate existing programming knowledge into working with Zig.
This is also not a full guide on all you need to know to write comptime. It’s more focused on providing a breadth of strategies, stretching your understanding in different ways that together lend a fuller picture of how to think about comptime.
