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Comment by amedvednikov | Hacker News Reader

I'd hardly call it a drama. Claims like it's not possible to build features without AST or codegen json decoders are just ridiculous.

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That is not what I stated in the issue.

For the kind of features that you wanted in your language, not just generics, requires a form of AST (abstract syntax tree), and if you language does not have an AST, which is technically possible, then you cannot have a lot of the features you have been advertising.

I should stress that that is also your misconception. For example, you can implement generics without an AST if you don't care about performance; codegen can either output a single binary mandatorily requiring a sort of vtable (therefore every parametric code will be indirected), or output a partial binary with holes where holes will be patched later (much faster but disallows optimization across hole boundaries).

You should have framed your question as follows: those features can be implemented without an AST, but an AST is a standard and reasonable way to do them and not using an AST would require a strong rationale. So what's that rationale? (And amedvednikov, this is my question for you.)

No you don't understand :) It's IMPOSSIBLE without AST. The Odin creator says so. That's why I'm a liar.

V simply generates functions for every type they're used with.

> V simply generates functions for every type it's used with.

So you have a "template" function as written in the source code and a list of actual functions generated. You can either generate them as a final step or on the fly as you encounter; in either ways you probably have a mapping from the function name to the function body or something similar. How is that stored?

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