Basic benchmark

[Don]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 3:07 AM, Jarrett Billingsley
> <jarrett.billingsley at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 12:55 PM, Jason House
>> <jason.james.house at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
>>>
>>>> I hope bearophile will eventually understand that DMD is not good at
>>>> optimizing code, and so comparing its output to GCC's is ultimately
>>>> meaningless.
>>> Personally, I appreciate seeing this stuff from bearophile.  I use D in ways where speed really does count.  One of my draws to D was that it was a systems language that could be faster than something like Java.  I also was sick of C++ and its problems, such as code that requires workarounds for compiler bugs or lack of compiler optimization.  It's really sad to see D requiring the same kind of stuff.  For D to become as mainstream as C++, all of this stuff that bearophile posts must be fixed.
>>>
>> Walter is the only one who can make DMD faster, and I think his time
>> is much better spent on designing and maintaining the language.
> 
> I think the point is not to convince Walter to spend time working on
> DMD's optimizer, but to convince him that the DMD optimizer is
> hopelessly obsolete and thus should be abandoned in favor of another,
> like LDC.  There's also the 64-bit issue.  I don't see Walter ever
> making the current toolchain 64-bit capable (at least not on Windows).
>  This is going to become an increasingly ridiculous limitation for a
> supposed "systems programming language" as time marches on.
> 
> At some point something has to change.
> 
>> The reference compiler is just supposed to be _correct_, not necessarily
>> _fast_.
> 
> Fortunately it's not an either/or situation.  If Walter chooses to
> move the reference compiler to a mainstream compiler infrastructure,
> then *he* can work on making the reference compiler correct, while
> many *other people* (including many who don't know anything about D)
> work on making the compiler fast.
> 
>> If Walter spent all his time working on making the the DMDFE
>> optimizer better and making DMD backend produce faster code, he
>> wouldn't have time to work on the language anymore,
> 
> Agreed.  That would be like putting lipstick on the proverbial pig.
> 
>> and it would be
>> duplicated effort since GDC and LDC already do it better.
> 
> I guess it's possible to imagine a world where Walter cranks out DMDFE
> code coupled to a sub-par DMD backend that no one uses, since everyone
> has moved on to LDC or something.  But why go there?  LDC is
> completely open source.  There's no reason the reference D compiler
> can't also be the fast D compiler.  And become more open in the
> process, too.
> 
> That reference compiler / fast compiler dichotomy might have been ok
> for C++ back in the old "cfront" days, but in those days people
> everywhere were dying for something a little more high-level than C.
> Today they aren't.  In those days the big corps took notice of C++ and
> most vendors were maintaining their own cfront-based compilers for
> their own platforms with their own custom back-end optimizations.
> There's nothing like that happening with D today.  Today the big corps
> have C++ and if that's not high-level enough then they have 32-dozen
> scripting languages and VM hosted byte-compiled languages to choose
> from.
> 
> So for a niche language like D, making the default compiler be a sucky
> compiler is very bad marketing in my opinion.  And talk about
> duplicating efforts -- every time Walter releases a new reference
> compiler, the developers on the fast compiler have to scramble to
> incorporate those changes, when they could be working on bug fixes and
> other useful performance improvements.  And downstream bugfixes is
> another area of duplicated efforts -- already LDC developers have
> fixed various bugs in the DMDFE, and these must then be posted to
> bugzilla for Walter to eventually put back into his version of DMDFE.
> 
> That said, LDC isn't quite there yet, especially on Windows, but it
> would be very encouraging to see Walter take at least a little
> interest in it.  The transition would be a little painful for a while,
> but much less painful than trying to write a new back end from
> scratch, and in the end I believe it would make D a much more viable
> platform going forward.
> 
> --bb

After having seen GDC fail to live up to expectations and become 
abandonware, it's unsurprising that Walter's unwilling to invest any 
emotional energy into LDC just yet. In six months the story may be 
completely different.