Inherent code performance advantages of D over C?

[Dicebot]

On Thursday, 12 December 2013 at 13:17:14 UTC, Manu wrote:
> But that's not a concern for typical programmers. That the 
> responsibility
> of sysadmins.
> What I meant was, 'what's more valuable [to a programmer]...'

Leaning dangerously close to philosophy here :)

>> Did you use many different compilers? I am afraid that doing 
>> that on a
>> common basis is feat of strength beyond my imagination :)
>
>
> Yup. Over the past 10 years, my day job involved:
> ...

Well, you are much more proficient and experienced C programmer 
than me :P (And than I will ever be considering I have no desire 
to return to that world) It is clearly beyond my imagination. I 
have been investigating dissassembly only to verify which stuff 
actually gets there and which not and debugging of course.

>> And of course I am speaking about drivers / kernels / 
>> barebone. I can't
>> imagine any other domain where using C is still absolutely 
>> necessary for
>> practical reasons.
>
> You mean C-like-native-languages? There's not really anything C 
> offers that
> C++/D doesn't also offer at the lowest level.

Right now problem is not with stuff C offers and D not. It is 
stuff that D offers on top and you are forced to fight to get 
back to C level of simplicity.

> Our choice to use C rather than C++ was in a sense, a funny way 
> to enforce
> a coding standard. Like I say, it forces simplicity, and a 
> consistent
> approach to problems.

When I was speaking about "domains where C is still necessary" I 
was not opposing it to C++ but other modern languages in general. 
Even real-time service development is quite possible using stuff 
like Erlang these days. Okay, there is also gamedev which I won't 
dare to speak about :) But in general there is no much sense to 
speak about replacing C and imagining any "normal" userspace 
application, even performance-critical.

Some time ago I have been part of project that completely changed 
my image of what C domain can be. It remains most mind-blowing 
experience in my programming history (which is damn short of 
course but can't resist dramatical intro). Project was in mobile 
networking / LTE domain with huge amount of people involved all 
over the world. Specifically our team in Latvia was responsible 
for node cluster software which acted essentially as a giant 
router + firewall. Actual nodes were custom multi-core MIPS 
machines with h/w implementation of event loop and part of IP 
stack handling. All actual packet processing code ran as barebone 
executables - no OS, not virtual memory or any fancy stuff, just 
platform SDK you take to build single processing binary which is 
than loaded at hard-coded memory address (all remaining memory is 
pre-allocated for packet handling purposes). No really 
complicated processing algorithms or anything like that but 
everyone was extremely picky about tiny details how this binary 
was actually running - making sure no instruction cache misses 
happen under normal workflow for each core, connection context 
struct fits into single cache line and stuff like that. And one 
of my responsibilities was actual performance testing of that 
system so I could have observed how much of an impact those 
seemingly small tweaks have made.

And now every time I hear that "language X can do all stuff C 
can" I imagine myself trying to sell this to other guys working 
on that project and have an extremely hard time doing this even 
in my imagination.