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

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Mon, 18 Jun 2012 13:53:43 -0400, Walter Bright  
<newshound2 at digitalmars.com> 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.

I have found that my project, which has a huge number of symbols (And  
large ones) compiles much slower than I would expect.  Perhaps you have  
forgotten about this issue:

http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4900

Maybe fixing this still doesn't help parsing, not sure.

-Steve