What is a value known at compile time?

Question

I'm studying the C++ programming language and in a chapter my book introduces me the concept of constant :

A constexpr symbolic constant must be given a value that is known at compile time

What is a value known at compile time ? Why we need of them ?

Answer 1

A constant expression means an expression that can be evaluated at compile-time (i.e. before the program runs, during compilation) by the compiler.

A constant expression can be used to initialize a variable marked with constexpr (referring to the C++11 concept). Such a variable gives the compiler the hint that it could be compile-time evaluated (and that might spare precious runtime cycles), e.g.

#include <iostream>

constexpr int factorial(int n) // Everything here is known at compile time
{
    return n <= 1 ? 1 : (n * factorial(n - 1));
}

int main(void)
{
    constexpr int f = factorial(4); // 4 is also known at compile time
    std::cout << f << std::endl;
    return 0;
}

Example

If you don't provide a constant expression, there's no way the compiler can actually do all this job at compile-time:

#include <iostream>

constexpr int factorial(int n) // Everything here is known at compile time
{
    return n <= 1 ? 1 : (n * factorial(n - 1));
}

int main(void)
{
    int i;
    std::cin >> i;
    const int f = factorial(i); // I really can't guess this at compile time..
                                // thus it can't be marked with constexpr
    std::cout << f << std::endl;
    return 0;
}

Example

The gain in doing compile-time extra-work instead of run-time work is performance gain since your compiled program might be able to use precomputed values instead of having to compute them from scratch each time. The more expensive the constant expression is, the bigger is the gain your program gets.