Release D 2.075.0

Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d-announce digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com
Sat Jul 22 14:06:35 PDT 2017


On 7/20/2017 1:20 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> Later that day, I mentioned in passing that we might make building D part of the 
> build process (of a project using D code), since building the compiler took only 
> 3 seconds on my machine.
> 
> To quote my colleague:
> 
> "Whaaaaaaaaaaat? How can a compiler compile in 3 seconds?!"

Back in the 80's (!) computer magazines regularly ran C compiler benchmark 
results. (At one time I counted 30 C compilers available for the PC.)

I took a class at Standford on compilers, which included a lot of info on data 
flow analysis. I decided to implement it. Data flow analysis optimizations 
basically deleted the benchmark code, because it didn't do anything (lots of 
dead assignments). This compiler was released as Datalight Optimum C.

The article writer concluded that the compiler had a giant bug in it, because it 
ran the benchmarks impossibly fast, because it deleted the dead code. Instead of 
being lauded as the only C compiler on the PC that did global data flow 
analysis, it was labeled as a buggy piece of crap.

By the time we dug ourselves out of that PR disaster, other compilers had 
implemented it, too.

Ironically, these days DMD gets repeatedly charged with not doing data flow 
analysis, and clang is assumed to have invented data flow analysis.

Just goes to show the power of marketing :-)



More information about the Digitalmars-d-announce mailing list