D for safety critical applications

[Max Haughton]

On Tuesday, 9 February 2021 at 17:25:17 UTC, Gregor Mückl wrote:
> On Tuesday, 9 February 2021 at 13:42:51 UTC, Max Haughton wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 9 February 2021 at 13:35:36 UTC, Gregor Mückl 
>> wrote:
>>> [...]
>>
>> 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.
>
> The specific project that allowed me to make that comparison 
> had an ultra low power Cortex-M4. That's an in-order design 
> with 3 pipeline stages and no optimizations for branching. So 
> it's primitive enough that raw instruction count translates 
> directly into performance.

I'm slightly surprised GCC generated larger code, but I can see 
it happening for something of that size.