Misc questions:- licensing, VC++ IDE compatible, GPGPU, LTCG, QT, SDL

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Dan W" <twinbee42 at skytopia.com> wrote in message 
news:hsovdd$1s1j$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> 2: Is it possible to use D with the Visual C++ IDE? Preferably, I would 
> like
> the apprepriate compiler and D options listed in the options (in place of 
> the
> usual c/c++ options).
>

Other people mentioned the recent D plugin for Visual Studio. If that isn't 
mature enough for you, there's a very mature plugin for Eclipse called 
Descent: http://www.dsource.org/projects/descent

> 3: I need my program to be as fast as possible.
>

Optimization often seems to be a mixed bag across any two modern languages.

On one hand, there are some cases where D can be a little slower than 
average. For instance, I've heard that the GC isn't great at handling lots 
of small objects. Bearophile can probably tell you a lot about any slow 
spots of D, he's done a lot of testing in that area.

On the other hand, there's plenty that D is fast with. Other people have 
mentioned a lot about this already. But I'll also add that the design of D 
has a few things that can allow certain things to be done in a more 
efficient way than can easily be done in C/C++. Array slicing (combined with 
GC), for example, has been shown to go a long way in helping to make a 
ridiculously fast (and memory-efficient) XML parser with less effort than it 
would take in C/C++:

http://dotnot.org/blog/archives/2008/03/10/xml-benchmarks-parsequerymutateserialize/
http://dotnot.org/blog/archives/2008/03/10/xml-benchmarks-updated-graphs-with-rapidxml/
http://dotnot.org/blog/archives/2008/03/12/why-is-dtango-so-fast-at-parsing-xml/