Language Shootout

[David B. Held]

Dave wrote:
> Dan Wrote:
> 
>> Hi guys,
>>
>> This idea will only work with Walter in on it.  : p  I was thinking that we might go through the various benchmarks in "the language shootout" and find out those items where D is significantly behind for any reason, and correct the performance.
>>
>> For example, against Eiffel, you see their Fasta implementation is 38 times faster than D's.  Why not compile the code, find out how it works and see why D's that much slower - and then Walter can fix the code?
>>
> 
> Huh? D is a tad better on one machine and just a bit slower on the other machine (on the Shootout). Maybe there was some sort of problem on the site when you looked at it?
> 
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=fasta&lang=all
> 
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=fasta&lang=all

In fact, the D version is written nicely, but the the fastest C++ 
version is clearly written for speed.  I'm willing to bet that D could 
close the gap by taking away all classes and using free functions + 
structs the way the C++ version does.  Anybody up for it?  Since we 
can't test on the shootout machine itself, improvements should be 
measured relative to the currently published version.

Dave