DMD compilation speed

w0rp via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Thu Apr 9 11:33:09 PDT 2015


On Wednesday, 1 April 2015 at 02:25:44 UTC, Random D-user wrote:
>> I've used D's GC with DDMD.  It works*, but you're trading 
>> better memory usage for worse allocation speed.  It's quite 
>> possible we could add a switch to ddmd to enable the GC.
>
> As a random d-user (who cares about perf/speed and just 
> happened to read this) a switch sounds VERY good to me. I don't 
> want to pay the price of GC because of some low-end machines. 
> Memory is really cheap these days and pretty much every machine 
> is 64-bits (even phones are trasitioning fast to 64-bits).
>
> Also, I wanted to add that freeing (at least to the OS (does 
> this apply to GC?)) isn't exactly free either. Infact it can be 
> more costly than mallocing.
> Here's enlightening article: 
> https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/12/10/hidden-costs-of-memory-allocation/

I think a switch would be good. My main reason for asking for 
such a thing isn't for performance (not directly), it's for being 
able to compile some D programs on computers with less memory. 
I've had machines with 1 or 2 GB of memory on them, wanted to 
compile a D program, DMD ran out of memory, and the compiler 
crashed. You can maybe start swapping on disk, but that won't be 
too great.


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