My choice to pick Go over D ( and Rust ), mostly non-technical

[Norm]

On Saturday, 3 February 2018 at 15:22:37 UTC, Rubn wrote:
> On Saturday, 3 February 2018 at 08:18:57 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 02, 2018 at 08:16:25PM -0800, Walter Bright via 
>> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>> On 2/2/2018 7:06 AM, Benny wrote:
>>> > Other languages have slogans, they have selling points.
>>> > 
>>> > When i hear Go, you hear uniformal, fast, simple syntax 
>>> > language.
>>> > When i hear Rust, you hear safe, manual memory management.
>>> > When i hear D, you hear ... ... ... ...
>>> 
>>>                           Fast code, fast
>>
>> Frankly, that slogan makes me cringe. Makes D sound like a 
>> fast food chain -- cheap code, fast. Would you like fa^Wfries 
>> with that?
>
> Yup I agree, it's a horrible slogan. Speed isn't even a 
> priority in D, if it was so many things would be different.
>
>> - Make dmd's optimizer better, esp. with loop unrolling on par 
>> with
>>   ldc/gdc, or better, so that we don't keep having to defend 
>> poor dmd
>>   benchmarks with "use ldc/gdc instead";
>
> I don't think time should be wasted on making DMD's optimizer 
> better. It's not an easy job and it'll just pull resources for 
> something that has no purpose. The compile times with DMD -O 
> can vary dramatically, it's best just to not use it at all. The 
> reason I hear as to why DMD even exists instead of just having 
> 1 compiler like Rust or any other language that isn't 20+ years 
> old. Is cause DMD's unoptimized compilation is fast and creates 
> reasonably fast enough code for debugging.

I agree, DMD should switch to LLVM backend. But it is unlikely to 
happen because the core DMD developers are in their comfort zone 
with DMD backend and worried that switching to LLVM would put 
them at the mercy of the LLVM community. To be honest though I 
don't know how much time DMD backend optimizer really takes core 
devs away from D language development. It would be interesting to 
see some numbers on this.

We use LDC exclusively where I work because DMD codegen just 
isn't production ready. And the argument that DMD debug builds 
are so much faster than LDC is bogus. Yes it is faster but 
nowhere near the point where we would consider swapping compilers 
between debug and release builds.

So that leaves little scripts and the like where DMD could maybe 
replace Python. But again, LDC isn't *that* slow in debug builds 
either and could do this just as well.

Cheers,
Norm