std.variant benchmark

[Gor Gyolchanyan]

std.variant is so incredibly slow! It's practically unusable for anything,
which requires even a tiny bit of performance.
Benchmark done under -noboundscheck -inline -release -O:

import std.stdio;
import std.variant;
import std.datetime;

void on()
{
auto var = Variant(5);
int i = var.get!int;
}

void off()
{
auto var = 5;
int i = var;
}

void main()
{
writeln(benchmark!(on, off)(100000));
}

The result is:

[TickDuration(25094), TickDuration(98)]

There are tons of cases, where a simple typeless data storage is necessary.
No type information, no type checking - just a low-level storage, upon
which Variant and other dynamic-type constructs can be built.

I want to ask the community: what's the best way to store any variable in a
typeless storage, so that one could store any variable in that storage and
get a reference to that variable given its static type with no type
checking and minimal overhead compared to a statically typed storage and
with type-safe storage (postblits, garbage collection...)?

-- 
Bye,
Gor Gyolchanyan.
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