Why is D unpopular?

[Adam D Ruppe]

On Wednesday, 25 May 2022 at 18:56:03 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Back in the olden daze, I've seen magazine compiler benchmark 
> articles trash various compilers for poor runtime performance.

I read a Raymond Chen thing not too long ago saying the reason 
they didn't do seconds on the Windows 95 clock is that swapping 
in a couple more pages each second hurt their benchmark 
performance. And since it wasn't that important to users, it got 
axed.

> So I'm leery of not being able to turn off the runtime checks 
> to get max performance.

I'm not against being able to do it - you have -boundscheck, and 
-check, and similar on the compiler switch, and you have .ptr in 
the language itself - my problem is putting it in the 
routine-sounding -release switch that people aren't fully 
educated on.

If you know exactly what is happening and understand why it is 
happening, do it.

But if you're just copying -release because "I want a release 
build" or because someone told you "you can win the benchmark if 
you use this" without realizing that it opens you back up to 
potentially serious problems, that's no good.

> Besides, it provides a way of accurately measuring how much the 
> runtime checks are costing.

Sure, use -boundscheck=off for that.