D compiles fast, right? Right??

burjui bytefu at gmail.com
Tue Apr 3 23:09:10 UTC 2018


Atila laid it out pretty clear: he doesn't care about the 
differences, he wants the work to be done. And I'm with him on 
that. Go and it's standard library may be way simpler, but it 
get's the job done (which is trivial in both cases, by the way) 
almost instantaneously, which is a much bigger deal than it seems 
to be. When your edit-compile cycle is that fast, it changes the 
way you write code, you develop a habit of writing smaller pieces 
of code and testing them more frequently. Remember that Linus 
Torvalds' talk about Git at Google?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8&t=3025

H. S. Teoh is not the only one here cringing at "fast code fast" 
on the main page. I use D from time to time for over 10 years 
now, and even used it at work and it was a relatively positive 
experience, thanks to vibe.d. But compilation times are just 
horrible - minimum 3 seconds for a 1500 lines project (on a 
8-core 4GHz CPU with 16 GB RAM), and that's after I ditched 
std.regex, made all imports qualified (didn't help that much, 
though) and switched to ld.gold. And I would be ok with slow 
compilation if DMD was smart enough, doing some graph magic, like 
extensive control flow analysis, and insane optimizations, but it 
doesn't. For example, Rust compilation times are no picnic 
either, but it's obvious why - you get nice good-looking error 
messages, tons of useful warnings and very fast programs free of 
memory corruption bugs. It's not the case with DMD, though. The 
language may be better than C++, but it's fastest compiler is 
slower and produces worse code? I'd rather not boast about speed 
at the main page in this situation. And god save us from ridicule 
by Goers.


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