I wasn't aware of the distinction between templates and macros in Nim, it does indeed sound powerful.
I'm also glad to see Nim having purity, its incredibly hard to go back once you've tasted it!
The Emacs macros I mentioned aren't saved anywhere; the similarities in syntax between C and D makes it very straightforward to write dumb macros on-the-fly and forget them afterwards. For the most part D improves on C's syntax by fixing a lot of its shortcomings and the macros merely reflect that.
One example would be to convert "#define foo 1" into "foo = 1," to be put inside an enum declaration. Another would be to remove the DLL_EXPORT references (as D does not require them). The function definitions themselves barely change at all :)
One thing I'm also curious about are compilation times. My D program still compiles under 2-3 seconds even with recursive reflection of 100+ aggregate types, outputting meta-data and code for every single type and field (to handle serialization, generate on-screen editors, resolve dependency graphs and more). I haven't found any other systems language giving me this much power for this little compilation times.
This even includes transforming my regex expressions into D code during compilation so the regexes get the full power of the language's optimizer.
I'll definitely keep Nim in mind for my next pet project, right now I'm getting over 30k LoCs in my D project and really don't want to switch languages halfway through! :)
I'm also glad to see Nim having purity, its incredibly hard to go back once you've tasted it!
The Emacs macros I mentioned aren't saved anywhere; the similarities in syntax between C and D makes it very straightforward to write dumb macros on-the-fly and forget them afterwards. For the most part D improves on C's syntax by fixing a lot of its shortcomings and the macros merely reflect that.
One example would be to convert "#define foo 1" into "foo = 1," to be put inside an enum declaration. Another would be to remove the DLL_EXPORT references (as D does not require them). The function definitions themselves barely change at all :)
One thing I'm also curious about are compilation times. My D program still compiles under 2-3 seconds even with recursive reflection of 100+ aggregate types, outputting meta-data and code for every single type and field (to handle serialization, generate on-screen editors, resolve dependency graphs and more). I haven't found any other systems language giving me this much power for this little compilation times.
This even includes transforming my regex expressions into D code during compilation so the regexes get the full power of the language's optimizer.
I'll definitely keep Nim in mind for my next pet project, right now I'm getting over 30k LoCs in my D project and really don't want to switch languages halfway through! :)