A proper language comparison...

[Brad Anderson]

On Thursday, 25 July 2013 at 18:23:19 UTC, Xinok wrote:
> Once in a while, a thread pops up in the newsgroups pitting D 
> against some other language. More often than not, these 
> comparisons are flawed, non-encompassing, and uninformative. 
> Most recently with the article comparing D with Go and Rust, 
> the community pointed out a few flaws involving a late addition 
> of one of the D compilers, build configurations 
> (-noboundscheck?), and the random number generator used.
>
> Then when I think about how web browsers are compared, there 
> are conventional measures and standard benchmarking tools (e.g. 
> sunspider). They measure performance for javascript, rendering, 
> HTML5, etc. They also measure startup times (hot/cold boot), 
> memory usage, etc. Finally, there are feature comparisons, such 
> as what HTML5 features each browser supports.
>
> These are the type of comparisons I'd like to see with 
> programming languages. For starters, there should be standard 
> "challenges" (algorithms and such) implemented in each language 
> designed to measure various aspects of the language, such as 
> sorting, number crunching, and string processing. However, 
> rather than leave it to a single individual to implement the 
> algorithm in several different languages, it should be left to 
> the community to collaborate and produce an "ideal" 
> implementation of the algorithm in their language. We could 
> analyze factors other than performance, such as the ease of 
> implementation (how many lines? does it use safe/unsafe 
> features? Was it optimized using unsafe / difficult features?).
>
>
> What can we do about it? I propose we come together as a 
> community, design challenges that are actually relevant and 
> informative, and release the first implementations in D. Then 
> we let the battle commence and invite other communities to 
> contribute their own implementations in other languages. I 
> think we should give it a try; start off small with just a few 
> moderate challenges (not too simple or complex) and see where 
> it goes from there.

Sounds somewhat like Rosetta Code.

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code

Bearophile spends a lot of time adding D entries there.