Faster Command Line Tools in D

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On 5/24/2017 3:56 PM, Jon Degenhardt wrote:
> Its not easy writing an article that doesn't draw some form of criticism. FWIW, 
> the reason I gave a Python example is because it is very commonly used for this 
> type of problem and the language is well suited to it. A second reason is that 
> I've seen several posts where someone has tried to rewrite a Python program like 
> this in D, start with `split`, and wonder how to make it faster. My hope is that 
> this will clarify how to achieve this.
> 
> Another goal of the article was to describe how performance in the TSV Utilities 
> had been achieved. The article is not about the TSV Utilities, but discussing 
> both the benchmark results and how they had been achieved would be a very long 
> article.

Any time one writes an article comparing speed between languages X and Y, 
someone gets their ox gored and will bitterly complain about how unfair the 
article is (though I noticed that none of the complainers wrote a faster Python 
version). Even if you tried to optimize the Python program, you'll be inevitably 
accused of deliberately not doing it right.

The nadir of this for me was when I compared Digital Mars C++ code with DMD. 
Both share the same optimizer and back end, yet I was accused of "sabotaging" my 
own C++ compiler in order to make D look better !! Me, I just don't do public 
comparison benchmarking anymore. It's a waste of time arguing with people about it.

I thought you wrote a fine article, and the criticism about the Python code was 
unwarranted (especially since nobody suggested better code), because the article 
was about optimizing D code, not optimizing Python.