D benchmark code review

Joseph Rushton Wakeling joseph.wakeling at webdrake.net
Sun Dec 15 02:30:35 PST 2013


On Saturday, 14 December 2013 at 19:46:36 UTC, Ola Fosheim 
Grøstad wrote:
> Do you think I am unfair?

I don't think it's a matter of fair or unfair.  If a use-case for 
D doesn't stand out for you, that's your call.

What I do think is that a lot of your arguments are either fairly 
abstract theoretical ones, or impressions based on a fairly 
limited amount of experience at a time when D was much less 
developed compared to where it is today.  Bear in mind you're 
speaking to someone who had a similar initial experience -- "Hmm, 
this seems pretty cool but doesn't give me the performance I need 
and get from C++, file it as 'one to watch'..." and has since 
come back to the language and used it extensively.  (For me it 
was the availability of a D2-supporting GDC in Ubuntu 12.04 that 
did it: ease of access combined with performance on par with C++.)

Your contention about fragmentation due to the 3 compilers is, I 
think, objectively false, however.  On the contrary, what 
differences there are have been continuously narrowing for the 
whole period of time that I've been actively using D, to the 
point where pretty soon the frontends of GDC, LDC and DMD will be 
100% identical code.

Oh, and -- I can't see that rewriting the compilers to output to 
C++ would really be easier than just implementing better direct 
support for interfacing with C++ in the language.  It honestly 
just seems like a good way to introduce a new opportunity for 
difficulty in debugging performance issues.

Bottom line -- with any language there is a hurdle of initial use 
that has to be jumped before one can really evaluate its 
practical usefulness.  If what you see in D today doesn't 
convince you that it's worth trying to take that jump a second 
time, then that's your judgement to make.  But I think you might 
get more out of spending a couple of hours trying things out in a 
playful way, rather than writing long emails debating fairly 
abstract philosophical ideas and desires for the language.

TL;DR I don't think it matters whether you're fair to D or not, 
but it matters that you're fair to yourself in giving yourself 
the chance to properly assess what D can do for you today :-)


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