Lack of open source shown as negative part of D on Dr. Dobbs

H. S. Teoh hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx
Wed May 9 17:21:45 PDT 2012


On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 01:47:27AM +0200, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 10/05/12 01:33, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> >Have you actually used them? I've tried and never got
> >far.
> 
> Yes, but that's because right now they are playing perpetual
> catch-up with DMD.  With the frontend stabilized, it'll be a
> different situation.
> 
> GDC works extremely well for me in general, and also produces
> significantly faster executables than DMD.

Yeah, gcc's backend has much more advanced optimizations that dmd.  I've
actually looked at the assembly code output for different D snippets,
and often find that gdc's output has just several instructions where dmd
would output half a page of instructions (or an entire function together
with the entire call/return sequence).

Plus the gcc backend automatically gives you access to a whole slew of
target architectures that dmd would never have the manpower to support.


T

-- 
English is useful because it is a mess. Since English is a mess, it maps
well onto the problem space, which is also a mess, which we call
reality. Similarly, Perl was designed to be a mess, though in the
nicests of all possible ways. -- Larry Wall


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