Explore Templates and CTFE

One of the power features of D is the possibility to easily execute code during the compilation phase (aka meta programming).

This has huge advantages:

• a lot of boilerplate code can be avoided as libraries can extend the language through code generation

• #perfmatter (https://twitter.com/hashtag/perfmatter?lang=de) since code can optimize itself during its compilation (e.g. D's standard library has one of the fastest RegExp parser if the RegExp is known at compile-time)

• "Design by Introspection" (https://dconf.org/2017/talks/alexandrescu.pdf) which could be described as Compile-Time Duck-Typing.

After explaining the essentials of templates and CTFE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compile_time_function_execution) (static if, static foreach), examples from real programs or libraries will be used to visualize the advantages of this two techniques.

About the speakers:

• Sebastian Wilzbach (https://github.com/wilzbach) was a GSoC student for the D Language Foundation in 2016 and has since become a core contributor to Phobos, D’s standard library.

• Stefan Rohe (https://github.com/lindt) is the first professional D programmer. Started in 2008 to introduce D into a C++/Java only shop where nowadays every new project is happily done in D.