D needs to publicize its speed of compilation

[user1234]

On Friday, 22 December 2017 at 10:06:18 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> This one of the main strengths of D, it is what Walter focuses 
> on, yet I have seen almost nothing on the D blog talking about 
> this.  What brought me to emphasize this today is this recent 
> post about how long it takes to compile the mostly-C++ Chromium 
> web browser and the reddit discussion about it:
>
> https://lobste.rs/s/iri1te/chromium_has_compilation_time_problem
> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7ktzog/chromium_has_a_compilation_time_problem/
>
> I'm tempted to call BS on that 6-7 hour build time, as I used 
> to contribute to the Chromium project, and I think it used to 
> take me 20 minutes for a release build in a FreeBSD jail on a 
> fairly weak, 2008-vintage mini-desktop, a dual-core Celeron 
> with 2 GBs of RAM (don't hold me to that build time, just a 
> vague recollection, but probably in the ballpark).  Of course, 
> the last time I built Chromium was more than 5 years ago, and a 
> lot has likely changed since then, such as now using LTO to 
> speed up the browser apparently, and maybe the 
> cross-compilation toolchain for ARM is slower, though others 
> note similar times for native x64 compilation also.
>
> That still implies a slowdown of 2-3 orders of magnitude over 
> the last 5 years, given the much more powerful hardware he's 
> using, which is nuts.
>
> D really needs the community to write blog posts talking about 
> how fast it is, publicizing that there is an alternative to 
> these glacial build times: who wants to do this?  It doesn't 
> need to be on the D blog, could just be on your personal blog, 
> but it is a message that really needs to be spread.

If this ever happens, what will be published will have to be 
based on LDC2.
If benchmarks based on DMD are published, the article will be 
subject to the criticism that is that the shorter build time is 
due to the optimization pass, since it's known not to be super 
deep in DMD backend.