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

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 2/22/12 9:51 PM, bearophile wrote:
> 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 assume you're referring to the point starting around 16:50. I don't 
see how fairness is an issue here. Anyway, the point there is that in my 
experience performance of short scripts in dynamic languages generally 
decays quickly when things get interesting. Of course, it comes without 
saying that choosing one particular script that exercises a very small, 
well-honed area of a toolchain and that is essentially dominated by 
library calls may show excellent performance of a scripting language.

> I am willing to write a benchmark too, if asked.

What would be better would be investigating what particular aspects of D 
we could improve (and better yet, contribute the improvements themselves).

If one were to corroborate this post with this other one:

http://forum.dlang.org/post/jhn1ub$2tni$1@digitalmars.com

the conclusion is there's a conspiracy afoot targeted at sabotaging D 
scripting :o).


Andrei