Newsgroups, off-topic

[Joseph Wakeling]

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> No, the problem is that it potentially makes him give away the rights
>> to the dmd backend. Which I think he can't legally do, even if he
>> wanted to.
> 
> I don't think there is any danger of this, it would be well established
> that Walter wrote all his proprietary backend code before he viewed gcc
> source.  The danger is for future code he writes.

I can see the concern here, certainly.

> Personally, I am not too concerned about the backend performance, it's
> not critical to D at this time.  Someone, somewhere, will make this
> better, and then any code written in D magically gets faster :)  We're
> talking about decreasing the constant for the D compiler complexity, not
> decreasing the complexity.  Code built with dmd runs plenty fast for me
> (save the GC performance, maybe we can focus on that first?).

I'm looking forward to seeing gdc released for D2 -- I think it will be
interesting to compare.  From what I understand part of the motivation
for reawakening it was a comparison of performance of code generated by
llvm and gcc respectively.

Part of my original issue over speed was that I'd heard D described as
'performance already as good as C++'.  So, I was coming with
expectations about what I'd be able to achieve ... :-)