Function to print a diamond shape

[Jay Norwood]

The computation times of different methods can differ a lot.   
How do you suggest to measure this effectively without the 
overhead of the write and writeln output?   Would a count of 
100001 and stubs like below be reasonable, or would there be 
something else that would  prevent the optimizer from getting too 
aggressive?

void writelnx(T...)(T args)
{
}
void writex(T...)(T args)
{
}