D benchmarks

[David Nadlinger]

Hi all,

I am currently finalizing my material for the LDC DConf talk, and 
I thought it would be nice to include a quick runtime performance 
comparison between the different compilers, just to give the 
audience a general sense of what to expect.

Thus, I am looking for benchmarks to use in the talk. 
Specifically, they should:

  - be open source, or at least source-available, so other people 
can reproduce the results
  - be *reasonably* self-contained, so that I don't have to spend 
three hours setting up build dependencies
  - be written mostly in D, I don't want to benchmark GCC
  - work with DMD 2.061 or DMD 2.062
  - run on Linux or OS X

I already have a few results (Dmitry's std.regex and std.uni 
benchmarks, WebDrake's Dregs, some of my own projects, …), but it 
would be great if some of you could point me to your own set of 
tests so I can hopefully paint a more complete picture.

There is a host of results if you search for »benchmark« here on 
the forums, but many of the discussed test cases are trivial 
micro-benchmarks, and I was hoping to add a few more elaborate 
performance tests to my collection.

In the future – i.e. as soon as possible, but somebody has to 
actually spend some time on setting things up –, we might also 
want to set up a nightly tester with such benchmarks to track 
performance of the different compilers over time. It's not as 
crucial for GDC and LDC as it is for the upstream backend 
projects, but there are still quite a few things to watch out for 
in druntime/Phobos and the LDC LLVM optimizations specific to D.

David



P.S.: Juan Manuel Cabo's "avgtime" is a really, _really_ useful 
tool for benchmarking whole programs and actually getting solid 
statistics out of it. Let's add something similar as a library 
for more finely-grained use!