> I believe more complex cases would significantly degrade the compiler speed (and probably the memory footprint as well) and would require a VM to leverage this.
I'm pretty sure most production grade c compilers already do some level of compiler time evaluation for optimization. And C already has constant expressions.
I think a bigger hurdle would be that the compiler needs access to the source code of the function, so it would probably be restricted to functions in the same translation unit.
And then there is the possibly even bigger people problem of getting a committee with representives from multiple compilers to agree on the semantics of such constant evaluation.
I'm pretty sure most production grade c compilers already do some level of compiler time evaluation for optimization. And C already has constant expressions.
I think a bigger hurdle would be that the compiler needs access to the source code of the function, so it would probably be restricted to functions in the same translation unit.
And then there is the possibly even bigger people problem of getting a committee with representives from multiple compilers to agree on the semantics of such constant evaluation.