opEquals(const ref yadaYada)

[Sergey Gromov]

Simen kjaeraas wrote:
> Steven Schveighoffer <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:44:18 -0500, lws <invalid at email.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On 2009-12-14 07:01:47 -0800, dsimcha <dsimcha at yahoo.com> said:
>>>
>>> 1.  Well, stuff like this is good warning to whomever about the 
>>> code.   Since D is a imperative language, it should at least give you 
>>> a warning when you're doing something really inefficient that has a 
>>> boilerplate way of accomplishing it that is much faster.
>>
>> It's not faster, it's slower.  Passing a reference to an integer or 
>> smaller value type is not as efficient passing the value type itself.
> 
> This is hardly true on modern architectures. I don't have the numbers on
> it, but even for ints and floats, ref is just as fast (and sometimes
> faster).

To return a reference you must allocate the value.  And to use the value 
you must dereference the reference.  All this takes cycles no matter how 
modern your architecture is.