Lower than C?

[Dan]

bearophile Wrote:

> Walter Bright:
> > High level language features are usually good for productivity. They can 
> > be good for optimization in that they give the compiler flexibility in 
> > how to implement a particular goal.
> 
> I presume the "vector operations" (+, * among whole arrays) are in the group of "good for optimization" too :-)
> 

If one assumes that the D compiler optimizes correctly, then HLL is good.  While Walter certainly is a talented compiler writer, like gcc, I doubt he can get even most of it right.  For example, I don't think he's leveraging SSE2 for much and so on.

The good thing about D is that you can very readily plug away in x86 assembler.  The bad thing is that we can't do x86-64 or any other kind of assembler just yet, and we still don't have compile-time code reflection.

These are some good reasons why I now program in IDA Pro.