GoingNative 6: The D Episode with Walter Bright and Andrei Alexandrescu

[bearophile]

Walter:

> http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/C9-GoingNative/GoingNative-6-The-D-Episode-with-Walter-Bright-and-Andrei-Alexandrescu

Andrei says that some new languages suffer because they have a poor implementation, because creating the base for a language is a lot of work.
Today this is issue is much less of a problem, new languages are implemented on the JavaVM, DotNetVM. System languages are implemented with LLVM.
And maybe PyPy will be a good base to create efficient dynamic languages quickly:
  http://tratt.net/laurie/tech_articles/articles/fast_enough_vms_in_fast_enough_time


Regarding the comparison between dynamic languages like Python or Ruby and D: what Andrei has said is not fully fair. A simple common scripting task: read the lines of a text file and put them in a hash. This is probably faster in Python compared to D. I am willing to write a benchmark too, if asked.


Regarding what Walter has said, that most of the code of D applications will be @safe: if safe code gets (or has to get) so common as he says, then it will be good for the D compiler to learn some tricks to avoid (optimize away) array bound tests in some cases.

Bye,
bearophile