is there some way to get the result of a function ...

# announcements

[Nikky]

is there some way to get the result of a function call into a const val ? some sort of pure function annotation that allows it to be executed at compiletime ?

[Ruckus]

Kotlin doesn't have a concept of a "pure function", or a way to execute functions at compile time. How can you execute it before compiling it?

[Shawn]

compile-time function execution is a pretty common thing

[Shawn]

it’s not really found in JVM languages, but elsewhere for sure

[hho]

According to the roadmap given by Andrey in the keynote at kotlinconf, there'll be an API for compiler plugins sometime in the future...

[hho]

@Shawn I think Scala has something like that on the JVM with their macros.

[Shawn]

Oh, I didn’t even know Scala had macros lol

[hho]

If there's a programming language feature, it's a pretty safe default to assume Scala has it... 🧌

[Nikky]

well could potentially shim it by making a gradle plugin that uses kotlinpoet and creates a new sourceset

[Nikky]

but this is actually for a script in buildSrc to simplify dependency managment in a project, having constants would possibly improve buildtimes

[Ruckus]

Yes, many languages do it with some sort of macro system, but that's arguably a separate "pre-compilation" step and not at compile-time. Technically the JVM has it to some degree with annotations and code generation.

[Ruckus]

It's often easier (at least from my perspective) to think of macros as inlined code generation annotations, and not actually part of the source code itself, but maybe I'm just crazy 🙂

[Nikky]

well i'd reall like to have that to inline some string concat or other and have them be const for other usecases (and i know string interpolation works but apparently not if done in a method to avoid copypasta

[ilya.gorbunov]

There's a feature request about that: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KT-14652