Faster Command Line Tools in D

[Jon Degenhardt via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Wednesday, 24 May 2017 at 21:46:10 UTC, cym13 wrote:
> On Wednesday, 24 May 2017 at 21:34:08 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> It's now #4 on the front page of Hacker News:
>>
>> https://news.ycombinator.com/news
>
> The comments on HN are useless though, everybody went for the 
> "D versus Python" thing and seem to complain that it's doing a 
> D/Python benchmark while only talking about D 
> optimization...even though optimizing D is the whole point of 
> the article. In the same way they rant against the fact that 
> many iterations on the D script are shown while it is obviously 
> to give different tricks while being clear on what trick gives 
> what.
>
> I am disappointed because there are so many good things to say 
> about this, so many good questions or remarks to make when not 
> familiar with the language, and yet all we get is "Meh, this 
> benchmark shows nothing of D's speed against Python".

Its not easy writing an article that doesn't draw some form of 
criticism. FWIW, the reason I gave a Python example is because it 
is very commonly used for this type of problem and the language 
is well suited to it. A second reason is that I've seen several 
posts where someone has tried to rewrite a Python program like 
this in D, start with `split`, and wonder how to make it faster. 
My hope is that this will clarify how to achieve this.

Another goal of the article was to describe how performance in 
the TSV Utilities had been achieved. The article is not about the 
TSV Utilities, but discussing both the benchmark results and how 
they had been achieved would be a very long article.

--Jon