We are forking D

[Walter Bright]

On 1/7/2024 6:58 PM, Don Allen wrote:
> The speed of the code generated by the language you are using is not necessarily 
> the determining factor of the speed of your application.

Interestingly, C string processing is pretty slow, in spite of it being a "too 
the metal" language.

The reason is simple. C strings are 0-terminated. This means that whenever you 
want to refer to a slice of a string that does not include the end, it is 
necessary to allocate memory, copy the slice to it, add a terminating 0, and 
then some time later free the memory.

This is quite wasteful and inefficient.

Another egregious source of inefficiency in C is the never-ending re-scanning of 
strings to find the length of them. This is CPU-intensive, and very 
cache-unfriendly.

This is where D's slices shine.

Yes, you can emulate D slices in C, but essentially every C API uses 0 
terminated strings so you're borked anyway.