I like the functionality but it is "surprising" that the best approach to accomplish this is to make it built-in in the language.

Well, one can write a small program that does puts Time.now.to_s(ARGV[0]) and then invoke that program with the run macro call, but I think that wanting the build date at compile time is something that's useful to have. We also have the env macro call, which again can be accomplished with run. I think everything can be accomplished with run, but some use cases are more frequent and maybe deserve a built-in.

Yeah, maybe I dislike that the code that interprets the macro differs to much from that Time.now.to_s. If there would be a way to grab real crystal code and specialize it in a macro so the execute_now is generated it would be more maintainable IMO (Crystal -> Macro).

But do not keep back on merging this :-) I am just thinking out loud and sharing weird ideas here.

@bcardiff I've been thinking of a better way to do this: #2639

With #2639, I'm not sure I'd like to merge this. One can also use date inside a macro, we are using it for the compiler and it works well. So I'll close this.