System programming in D (Was: The God Language)

[Walter Bright]

On 12/30/2011 12:16 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> I agree, but this wasn't as much about heuristics, but compiler capabilities
> (e.g. inlining assembler functions).

Adding a keyword won't fix the current problem that the compiler won't inline 
inline assembler functions. It's an orthogonal issue.

I know there are features on various C compilers to force inlining, I know 
there's a demand for them.

But I've also, over the years, spent thousands and thousands of hours optimizing 
the hell out of things, so I have some experience with it.

Once the compiler gets past a certain level of heuristic inlining decisions, 
forcing it to inline more is just chasing rainbows.

And if one really wants to force an inline, one can do things like the C memcpy 
using the preprocessor, or string mixins in D, or even cut&paste. If you need to 
do that in more than a couple places in the code, something else is wrong (that 
old saw about only a tiny percentage of the code being a bottleneck is true).

Also, if you are tweaking at such a level, every compiler is different enough 
that your tweaks are likely to be counterproductive on another compiler. Having 
a portable syntax for such tweaking is not going to help.