AST files instead of DI interface files for faster compilation and easier distribution

[Daniel]

On Monday, 18 June 2012 at 17:54:40 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 6/18/2012 6:07 AM, Don Clugston wrote:
>> On 17/06/12 00:37, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> On 6/14/2012 1:03 AM, Don Clugston wrote:
>>>>> It is for debug builds.
>>>> Iain's data indicates that it's only a few % of the time 
>>>> taken on
>>>> semantic1().
>>>> Do you have data that shows otherwise?
>>>
>>> Nothing recent, it's mostly from my C++ compiler testing.
>>
>> But you argued in your blog that C++ parsing is inherently 
>> slow, and you've
>> fixed those problems in the design of D.
>> And as far as I can tell, you were extremely successful!
>> Parsing in D is very, very fast.
>
> Yeah, but I can't escape that lingering feeling that lexing is 
> slow.
>
> I was fairly disappointed that asynchronously reading the 
> source files didn't have a measurable effect most of the time.

Same here, I wish there were a standardized pre-lexed-token 
"binary" file-format, would benefit all text editors also, as 
they need to lex it anyway to perform color syntax highlighting.