stdio performance in tango, stdlib, and perl

[Walter Bright]

kris wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email) wrote:
>> kris wrote:
> [snip]
>>> Tango should still come out in front, although I have to say that 
>>> benchmarks don't really tell very much in general i.e. doesn't mean 
>>> much of anything important whether tango "wins" this or not (IMO)
>>
>>
>> Why not? 
> 
> If tango were terribly terribly slow instead, then it would be cause for 
> concern. If I have some program that needs to run faster I'll find a way 
> to do just that; another reason why tango.io is fairly modular

One problem with C++, as I mentioned before, is that the 
straightforward, out of the box coding techniques don't get you fast 
code. One of my goals with D is to fix that - the straightforward, 
untuned code should get you most of the possible speed. I think the wc 
benchmark shows this off.

Having to recode one's programs to speed them up is a big productivity 
sapper. (The most egregious examples of this are people forced to recode 
bits of their python/java/ruby app in C++.)

What makes stdio so worth the effort to speed up is because the payoff 
is evident in 80-90% of the programs out there. Optimizing your own 
program speeds up only your own program - optimizing the library speeds 
everyone up.

Tango doesn't need to be terribly, terribly slow to be a cause for 
concern. It only needs to be slower than C++/Perl/Java to be a problem, 
because then it is a convenient excuse for people to not switch to D.

The conventional wisdom with C++ is that:

1) C++ code is inherently faster than in any other language
2) iostream has a great design
3) iostream is uber fast because it uses templates to inline everything

Andrei's benchmark blows that out of the water. Even interpreted Perl 
beats the pants off of C++ iostreams.