D benchmark code review

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad" <ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang at gmail.com>]

On Sunday, 15 December 2013 at 10:30:36 UTC, Joseph Rushton 
Wakeling wrote:
> 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.

Ok, that is quite possible, but I that might also be the case for 
BSD… FreeBSD is probably on par with Linux, but it is still 
perceived as being part of a fragmented ecosystem. Open source 
projects that fragment tend to die, so I think people are a bit 
uneasy about that in general. I agree that it is a superficial 
measurement.

> 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.

If I write an engine in D and then want to port it to iOS…

> 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.

Actually, my arguments are not philosophical. They are pragmatic.

D is not high level enough to be high level and not low level 
enough to give sufficient low level control.

I would want a C++-replacement to give me convinient access to 
hardware-level features such as transactional memory in the 
Haswell processor etc. Making 3 compiler backends support stuff 
like that seems a bit unrealistic.

> 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 :-)

Well, if it did support transactional memory and was more clearly 
dedicated towards low-level programming I would use it to have 
lock free concurrent programming in a relatively clean 
programming language.

O.