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Maybe I am just a huge dummy, but I have yet to find examples of metaprogramming in the wild that aren't just mind-meltingly hard to grok. (Most of what I have seen is Python and Rust).

I have no doubt about how powerful metaprogramming is, but it makes me feel that understanding and contributing to libraries that use it is out of my reach.

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I think what's novel about Zig's approach is that the metaprogramming is just normal code which happens to be executed at compile-time.

I have found that when any project gets to a certain size, it's almost inevitable that metaprogramming will be required, unless you want to make everything super dynamic and sacrifice performance. The idea of being able to do metaprogramming in the language I used to write the program itself is an interesting one.

I don't know if Kelley would agree with my characterization, but I don't see comptime as metaprogramming. Instead it opens the very interesting possibility of having types as values, as long as those values are resolvable at compile time. This lets you do things that feel like metaprogramming (e.g. making a generic container structure) but it seems a better conceptual fit to me that you're programming with types as values rather than generating code from a template or macro.

This is nothing novel. LISP macros is exactly that.

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