std.conv.to!string(float) Is too heavy

[user1234]

On Tuesday, 12 October 2021 at 14:47:21 UTC, Hipreme wrote:
> I have wrote a simple hello world using std.conv:
>
>
> ```
> import std.conv:to;
> import std.stdio;
>
> export void MAIN(float b)
> {
> 	writeln("Hello World " ~ to!string(b));
> }
> ```
>
> Building that with dmd app.d -lib creates 500KB lib
> With `-g`, it goes up to 800KB
>
> Using ldc, the build time goes up by 2 times.
>
> if you simply change from `float b` to `int b`, the lib goes 
> down from 500KB to 60KB.

You compare apples and oranges. Convertion from integer types to 
string is trivial, converting float types to string is not.

That being said there's some room for improvment. `writeln` of a 
`float` will take the same path as `format(%f, v)`, which 
contains the code to format float in every possible way, as the 
specifier is not known at compile time, and finally only a small 
part of the bloat generated is executed.

This is bit strange, as for writeln, the specifier is known at 
compile time.

> The build times decreases by almost 10x (must check), but I can 
> feel that anyway.
>
> Using std.conv greatly degrades a modularized workflow, by 
> increasing a lot of build time and binary size. I needed 
> implementing my own to! function to get a much better build 
> time for my program.