"Competitive Advantage with D" is one of the keynotes at C++Now 2017

Patrick Schluter via Digitalmars-d-announce digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com
Sat Apr 29 07:13:18 PDT 2017


On Saturday, 29 April 2017 at 11:48:46 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Saturday, 29 April 2017 at 11:24:36 UTC, Patrick Schluter 
> wrote:
>> C99 says "if an int can represent all values of the original 
>> type, the value is converted to an int; otherwise, it is 
>> converted to an unsigned int."
>
> Well, C is making the simple assumption that registers are 
> int-sized...

That's not a simple assumption, it's acknowledgment that a C 
program runs on real
hardware not a virtual machine like Java or C#.
>
> This is no longer true of course, as "registers" are "SIMD 
> sized".

SIMD and GP are not related and one will never replace the other. 
SIMD is generally for floating point, when it is used for 
integer, it is not for the usual integer semantics and requires 
special handling in any case.

> So I am pretty sure it will lead to suboptimal code in some 
> instances.

Can also be said if it had another semantic.

>
>> While quite often surprising for people coming from other 
>> languages, I think that Walter's persistence in following the 
>> basic C rule is a good thing.
>
> Why is it a good thing?

For the same reason it is in C. If the ambition for D is to be a 
system language then it should avoid introducing artificial 
abstractions and work with the machine it runs on, not against.


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