Yet another strike against the current AA implementation

[Daniel Keep]

Michel Fortin wrote:
> On 2009-04-27 10:51:22 -0400, Frits van Bommel
> <fvbommel at REMwOVExCAPSs.nl> said:
> 
>> I edited this code to work with ldc (D1) + Tango, and saw the Direct
>> and opApply cases generate identical code (inc, cmp, jne, with the
>> loop counter in a register) [1], so they're equally fast (modulo
>> process scheduling randomness).
> 
> Thank you for your timings. I think it shows my point: that by prefering
> ranges over opApply we're just optimising around a deficiency in DMD's
> optimizer.

Not true.  Here's an excellent reason to use ranges over opApply: you
can't define zip with opApply.  Because opApply uses inversion of
control, you can't use more than one without bringing threads into the
equation.

> I'm thinking... with proper inlining, perhaps we could take the notion
> of ranges out of the compiler and just define a generic opApply in
> std.range that use front, popFront, and empty. :-) Perhaps.

I suspect supporting ranges is just much easier.

  -- Daniel