Why I chose D over Ada and Eiffel

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Wed, 21 Aug 2013 18:50:35 +0200
"Ramon" <spam at thanks.no> wrote:
> 
> I am *not* against keeping an eye on performance, by no means. 
> Looking at Moore's law, however, and at the kind of computing 
> power available nowadays even in smartphones, not to talk about 8 
> and 12 core PCs, I feel that the importance of performance is way 
> overestimated (possibly following a formertimes justified 
> tradition).
> 

Even if we assume Moore's law is as alive and well as ever, a related
note is that software tends to expand to fill the available
computational power. When I can get slowdown in a text-entry box on a
64-bit multi-core, I know that hardware and Moore's law, practically
speaking, have very little effect on real performance. At this point,
it's code that affects performance far more than anything else. When we
hail the great performance of modern web-as-a-platform by the fact that
it allows an i7 or some such to run Quake as well as a Pentium 1 or 2
did, then we know Moore's law effectively counts for squat -
performance is no longer about hardware, it's about not writing
inefficient software.

Now I'm certainly not saying that we should try to wring every last
drop of performance out of every place where it doesn't even matter
(like C++ tends to do). But software developers' belief in Moore's law
has caused many of them to inadvertently cancel out, or even reverse,
the hardware speedups with code inefficiencies (which are *easily*
compoundable, and can and *do* exceed the 3x slowdown you claimed in
another post was unrealistic) - and, as JS-heavy web apps prove, they
haven't even gotten considerably more reliable as a result (Not that JS
is a good example of a reliability-oriented language - but a lot of
people certainly seem to think it is).