Article: Increasing the D Compiler Speed by Over 75%

[Peter Alexander]

On Friday, 2 August 2013 at 17:16:30 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 2013-08-02 15:44:13 +0000, Leandro Lucarella said:
>> I'm not say is right or wrong for people to have this reflex 
>> of thinking
>> about multipliers, I'm just saying if you care about 
>> transmitting the
>> message as clear as you can, is better to use numbers 
>> everybody can
>> intuitively think about.
>> 
>> And this is in reply to Andrei too. I understand your POV, but 
>> if your
>> main goal is communication (instead of education about side 
>> topics),
>> I think is better to stick with numbers and language that 
>> minimizes
>> confusion and misinterpretations.
>> 
>> Just a humble opinion of yours truly.
>
>
> Fair enough. So what would have been a better way to convey the 
> quantitative improvement?

Not to speak on Leandro's behalf, but I think the obvious answer 
is "Reduced compile times by 43%".

It's much more useful to express it that way because it's easier 
to apply. Say I have a program that takes 100 seconds to compile. 
Knowing that the compilation time is reduced by 43% makes it easy 
to see that my program will now take 57 seconds. Knowing that 
compilation is 75% faster doesn't help much at all - I have to 
get out a calculator and divide by 1.75.

It's always better to use a measure that is linear with what you 
care about. Here, most people care about how long their programs 
take to compile, not how many programs they can compile per 
second.