D 2.061 release

[Walter Bright]

On 1/7/2013 3:13 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
> I just thought I should report that 2.061 has fixed all the threading
> problems I was moaning about after the 2.059 → 2.060 update.  So thanks
> to all concerned with fixing the bug reports that were generated.

That is great news!


> LDC is though still generally creating faster executables than DMD. This
> is just a gut feeling right now, in a couple of weeks time I'll see if I
> can get some actual numbers.

It's also helpful to drill down to see why. For example, a while back a D user 
posted a benchmark where he concluded that dmd generated poor code for integer 
math. Drilling down into the generated code, it was pretty much the same as what 
other compilers generated. What was different, however, was the implementation 
of the "long divide" library function. druntime had a slow one. The long divide 
dominated the performance profile. Fixing that brought it up to par with zero 
changes to the compiler.

I've also seen benchmarks where the compiler was blamed, where malloc, or 
printf, or strcpy, or whatever was the actual dominant cycle sucker. Or even 
that the wrong compiler switches were used. Yes, I've seen magazines publish 
benchmarks where the 'slow' compiler was used with debug switches on, and the 
'fast' compiler had the optimization switches on.