Why Strings as Classes?

[bearophile]

Walter Bright:
> > We've already observed that D assoc arrays are less performant than even 
> > Python maps, so the extra cost of lookup operations is unwelcome.
> 
> Every one of those benchmarks that purported to show that D AA's were 
> relatively slow turned out to be, on closer examination, D running the 
> garbage collector more often than Python does. It had NOTHING to do with 
> the AA's.

Really? I must have missed those conclusions then, despite reading all the posts on the subject. What solutions do you propose for the problem then? I recall that disabling the GC didn't improve the situation much. So the problem now becomes how to improve the D GC? 

In my site I am keeping a gallery of tiny benchmarks where D code (with DMD) is 10 or more times slower than very equivalent Python, C, Java code (I have about 12 programs so far, very different from each other. There's a benchmark regarding the associative arrays too). Hopefully it will become useful once people will start tuning D implementations.

Bye,
bearophile