Faster Command Line Tools in D

[Jon Degenhardt via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Thursday, 25 May 2017 at 05:17:29 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Any time one writes an article comparing speed between 
> languages X and Y, someone gets their ox gored and will 
> bitterly complain about how unfair the article is (though I 
> noticed that none of the complainers wrote a faster Python 
> version). Even if you tried to optimize the Python program, 
> you'll be inevitably accused of deliberately not doing it right.
>
> The nadir of this for me was when I compared Digital Mars C++ 
> code with DMD. Both share the same optimizer and back end, yet 
> I was accused of "sabotaging" my own C++ compiler in order to 
> make D look better !! Me, I just don't do public comparison 
> benchmarking anymore. It's a waste of time arguing with people 
> about it.
>
> I thought you wrote a fine article, and the criticism about the 
> Python code was unwarranted (especially since nobody suggested 
> better code), because the article was about optimizing D code, 
> not optimizing Python.

Thanks Walter, I appreciate your comments. And correct, as 
multiple people noted, a speed comparison with other languages 
not at all a goal of the article.

The real intent was to tell a story of how several of D's 
features play together to enable optimizations like this, without 
having to write low-level code or step outside the core language 
features and standard library.

--Jon