GDScript → Add conditional compilation directives

[azur-wolve]

C has #if that you can use to perform conditional compilation.
It is useful to make a separation between "testing mode" and "normal mode".
The core idea is to have some lines of codes (checks, print statements and so on) that would be ignored when exporting the project by disabling it → #TESTING_MODE = false
Using another syntax compatible with GDScript.

Another way could be use a keyword to "mark" blocks of code.
Could be by creating some "special" bool variable and then use it to "mark" blocks of code.

Example:

# in the header section where the other fields are declared..
<keyword> conditional_var = true

# somewhere in the code
conditional_var:
# a block of nested code

The difference with a normal bool would be that it tells the compiler to ignore it if false. Useful to release/export and so on.

It would be declared mostly inside Autoloads.

(Probably something like that had been already proposed.)

[Kazetsukai]

One method that works quite well already to achieve this kind of thing is features. You can set different features per export, and check whether those are set.

There is even a default feature set that tells you if you are running in debug mode or not, which can be very useful.

[azur-wolve]

when using

if OS.has_feature("debug"):
    print("text")

It would not compile/ship to the exported binary file?

[Kazetsukai]

It will be in the bytecode. Is there a reason for wanting it not to be?

[azur-wolve]

Not a particular one. Not pretty sure on how convenient is to have many if statements out there, aren't they adding overhead?

[lentsius-bark]

Depending on the complexity of the checks I imagine the overhead may at times be unwanted and improve performance

[Mickeon]

For the sake of completion, I'm going to mention the proposal for conditional compilation with Feature Tags here, as well.

[setanarut]

Useful but bad idea that reduces code readability. Makes it difficult to read code written by others. I love the philosophy that less keyword is better. Go language should be taken as an example

[dalexeev]

I made a plugin: dalexeev/gdscript-preprocessor.