D needs to publicize its speed of compilation

Joakim dlang at joakim.fea.st
Thu Dec 28 07:05:25 UTC 2017


On Sunday, 24 December 2017 at 22:55:12 UTC, aberba wrote:
> 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:
>>
>> [...]
>
> Memory consumption is a deal breaker.

The dmd frontend prioritized speed over memory, which can cause 
problems with large or CTFE-heavy projects on low-memory systems:

http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/increasing-compiler-speed-by-over-75/240158941

On Wednesday, 27 December 2017 at 21:23:15 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
> I thought D did market itself that way.

It has historically been a selling point, but perhaps it has been 
taken for granted.  I'm saying it needs a marketing push now.

I just went and checked the front page of the website, and I see 
a new marketing slogan that was added a couple weeks ago, "write 
fast, read fast, and run fast.  Fast code, fast:"

https://github.com/dlang/dlang.org/pull/1965

However, "build fast" is not included in that list.  You could 
argue it's implied by "write fast" or the last "code, fast," but 
it's not mentioned in the list under "write fast" below.  So even 
the front page doesn't highlight build speed, one of the core 
advantages of D.

> However, my experience has been that D has fast builds from 
> scratch, but is really really slow for incremental builds. 
> Here's the thing: personally I don't care about anything except 
> incremental builds. It's great that Phobos compiles in seconds 
> when I do a git fetch after months. Win! Oh wait, I'm working 
> on a bug, changed one character and it still takes the same 
> amount of time...
>
> Given that I write D code every day now, this incremental 
> compilation situation is driving me nuts, and I'm definitely 
> going to do something about it.
>
> It's getting so bad that the day at work I had to write C++ I 
> was happy. Because the edit-compile-link-test cycle was 
> _faster_. Think about that for a bit - I enjoyed writing C++ 
> (!!! either it or Scala are the slowest languages to compile 
> ever) because I got faster feedback. Epic fail.
>
> It's also possible I use templates and CTFE more that the 
> regular D programmer. But... they're some of the main reasons I 
> use D in the first place! I don't want to write Java in D 
> syntax.

What do you plan to do about it?


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