Poll: Primary D version

[retard]

Tue, 25 May 2010 14:22:47 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:

> retard wrote:
>> I don't think the D community is really interested in hearing something
>> positive about dynamically typed non-native languages. Traditionally
>> that's the best way to wreck your efficiency and it's tough to admit
>> that those languages are now better. The traditional native code way is
>> to use primitive compilers and brute force via inline asm.
> 
> If this were true, C and C++ would be dead languages. C++, for example,
> is often used in combination with Python. The C++ part is for the bits
> that need to be fast.
> 
> BTW, even the best compilers fall far short of what an expert can do
> with assembler.

It's impossible to say whether e.g. LuaJIT is faster than some C++ 
compiler. The code matters. Bad code written by a novice programmer often 
works faster when a higher level language is used because there's more 
room for optimizations. However, it really depends on the quality of the 
optimzations done by the compiler.

What I wanted to point out was that if a person needs to choose between D 
(DMD) and Lua (LuaJIT), it would probably make more sense to use LuaJIT 
if the user wants better performing code. However, D (LDC) and D (some 
other vendor who uses modern backends like LLVM/GCC) probably win DMD 
here. Almost all compilers probably beat it.