D vs Java

[Dave]

In article <dvkklp$2pl$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...
>
>Is it invalid to include all these compile times, even if they occur well 
>into the execution, as part of the benchmark time? I don't think so. At the 

No doubt it is valid to include that. Not only user time but time it takes from
other processes on a heavly used system.

It's hard to measure how much overhead this incurs in a real-life program. Sun
has -Xprof which can give some info. but I've not seen this used on production
programs.

>end of the day, the time the user is sitting their waiting is what matters, 
>and that will include all the startup, interpretation, compilation and 
>recompilation times.
>

On one 80 line program I have here that takes 1.5 secs to run, the profiler says
compilation is 1% of the total, and that doesn't seem to include the time to do
the runtime profiling for the optimizer. That's one small program that has one
main loop calling one function. On large real-world programs with many loops,
functions, selective finalization and all kinds of references floating around
and being moved by the GC, the reprofiling/recompilation probably happens a lot
more.

Since they've been perfecting this stuff for years, IMO there's pretty
compelling evidence that there may be intractable problems with this type of
approach.