Could D benefit from JIT compiling?

[Timon Gehr]

On 12/02/2011 04:46 PM, Xinok wrote:
> Reading through the 'Java > Scala' thread, I've realized there are some
> benefits to dynamic code generation vs statically compiled code. Things
> like unrolling loops, devirtualizing functions, etc.
>
> So it made me wonder, could D benefit from such technology, not from a
> feature standpoint, but strictly optimization? I'm not familiar with the
> topic, but I imagine there could be a few situations that would benefit
> in terms of performance, as long as it doesn't affect interoperability.

There could be cases where it helps somewhat. I don't expect that the 
benefit in comparison to normal compilation to native code would be very 
high, because

  - You already got native code.
  - The optimizer might have used some advanced dynamic instrumentation, 
leading to similar performance effects as the use of a tracing JIT 
optimizer, if the typical tasks stay roughly the same.

Actually getting it to work for comparison certainly would be an 
interesting experiment though.