Optimizations and performance

[Dave via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 8 June 2016 at 22:32:49 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Wednesday, 8 June 2016 at 22:19:47 UTC, Bauss wrote:
>> D definitely needs some optimizations, I mean look at its 
>> benchmarks compared to other languages: 
>> https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks
>>
>> I believe the first step towards better performance would be 
>> identifying the specific areas that are slow.
>>
>> I definitely believe D could do much better than what's shown.
>>
>> Let's find D's performance weaknesses and crack them down.
>
> I wouldn't put too much emphasis on that benchmark as the 
> implementations appear different? Note that Felix compiles to 
> C++, yet beats C++ in the same test? Yes, Felix claims to do 
> some high level optimizations, but doesn't that just tell us 
> that the C++ code tested wasn't optimal?

Languages should be fast by default. I always find it missing the 
point when people go crazy during these benchmarking tests trying 
to make the code as fast as possible by tweaking both the code 
and the compiler flags. Go through that effort with a 2 million 
line app. Tell me how long that takes.

In short, the truer metric is how fast does the code run casually 
writing code. Good languages will run fast without having to 
think super detailed about it. Now it is also useful to know how 
fast the language can get when someone dives into the details. 
Don't get me wrong. I just think the casual case is far more 
important.

I've also noticed that during these benchmark wars people tend to 
compare compilers more than languages anyhow. And they tout their 
ability to tweak the compiler and write (at times very esoteric 
code for the sake of performance) as a win for their language. 
That's also missing the point.