stdio performance in tango, stdlib, and perl

Walter Bright newshound at digitalmars.com
Thu Mar 22 02:57:28 PDT 2007


James Dennett wrote:
> I'm at a loss to understand why you would write what you
> did.  It seems to be a straw man, but maybe there was
> something else to it -- frustration that people assume
> that D must be slower than C++?

Maybe it is a bit of frustration on my part. I often run into people 
who, when faced with benchmarks showing that conventional D runs code 
faster than conventional C++, tell me in various ways that it can't be 
true. I must have:

1) written bad C++ code
2) lied
3) used a sabotaged C++ compiler
4) written some magic optimization that only works on that carefully 
crafted benchmark

So, I have some justification in saying what I did about the 
conventional wisdom of C++. I also know that the top tier of experienced 
C++ programmers are well aware such conventional wisdom is not true.

I have a lot of experience in making C++ code run fast. It doesn't come 
easy, it takes a lot of work back and forth with a profiler. It usually 
involves going around the C++ runtime library. That experience has 
certainly strongly influenced the design of D. I don't wish to have to 
write custom I/O just to get good I/O performance. I don't wish to keep 
doing all the clever string hacks trying to make 0 terminated strings fast.

I want the natural, straightforward D code to be (at least close to) the 
best performing way to implement an algorithm.



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