Comptime Linting Using @typeInfo

[Sze]

I think neither comptime nor codegen are great approaches to implement this kind of check, because implementations seem to require too much awkward complexity.

I am not sure if it would work, but if it did, it may make sense to implement using techniques like clr:

What makes "ban returning pointer to stack memory" difficult?

Just watched @ityonemo’s video explaining how clr can detect many “unsafe” operations, like returning stack pointers, at compile-time by statically analyzing Zig’s AIR: [Clr: proof of concept compile-time safety for Zig] Very cool, thought I’d share here as it relates to the problem statement.

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I think ideally Zig would gain something like Lint/Validation-time, which can be configured via the build system and sort of runs like a compiler plugin. I think it would already be possible to do as a run step that re-does some of the things the compiler has already done, or looks at some of the intermediary outputs of the compiler, but having this as a validation-time feature, might make these sorts of checks easier to write.

Another possibility might be that something like this could be implemented via the compiler-protocol, once it is implemented.

related:

Zig Validation

By this, are you referring to annotations ala JavaScript @decorators or PHP #[attributes]? If so, I definitely see the value, as they make it easy to add functionality and static analysis information, but that very magic seems to be antithetical to Zig’s desire to be fiercely simple and avoid magic / hidden logic. Thoughts?