D for safety critical applications

[Max Haughton]

On Tuesday, 9 February 2021 at 13:35:36 UTC, Gregor Mückl wrote:
> On Tuesday, 9 February 2021 at 10:10:05 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
>> [...]
>
> There is a fair amount of hate in this post that I can't agree 
> with. I've worked with certified compilers, too. It was mainly 
> one of the major products in the field. The package was a mixed 
> bag. The custom IDE is lacking and the proprietary build tools 
> are not very good, but the actual compiler for our target 
> platform turned out to be very good. We threw it at a pretty 
> big preexisting codebase and it worked (we had a few places 
> where we were relying on subtle UB - that's on us). Compared to 
> GCC, the generated code would consistently be smaller and thus 
> faster, even when I compared unoptimized builds to GCC with 
> optimizations (curiously, speed optimized GCC output was 
> smaller than size optimized output!).

What architecture was this running on? I say that because small 
is often not fast on a big machine - and the reason why fast gave 
smaller code is probably because of the weird non-determinism you 
get in big compilers as more stuff is inlined giving way to more 
information for the optimizer to use locally.