D needs to publicize its speed of compilation

Chris Chris at c.com
Fri Dec 22 11:46:49 UTC 2017


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.

D does not do itself any favors when it keeps accepting mediocre 
results in benchmarks.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/previews/round15/

Some years it does not complete the tests, in others it shows 
results that are below mediocre.

Vibe.d ( and other D web frameworks ) benching twice slower then 
scripting languages like PHP/Ruby. That does not advertise D.

How about:

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/

No D there? Performance must be bad because its not listed at all 
( for a language that exist 20 years )?

Another one:

https://github.com/costajob/app-servers

Single threaded ( look at CPU total ), losing to other languages 
again.

Impressions are everything when there is a wealth of languages to 
pick from. Anybody stumbling over these results think: Well, i am 
better going with Go, Rust, Crystal, ... for a web hosting as 
they show more consistent high speed results.


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