We should deprecate -release

[Walter Bright]

On 7/12/2024 10:55 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> I think it's fair to say no "journalists" are reviewing D in print. For sure, 

In print, no, online certainly, and when they're evaluating whether to use D or 
not, absolutely.


> people who try to run benchmarks will at least look for the proper optimization 
> flags, and I bet nobody is looking to remove bounds checks.

What they'll do is compare it to C and C++, neither of which does bounds checks, 
and on the same code C and C++ will be faster, and D will be slow, and that will 
be the result of the benchmark. They will not look deeper.

First impressions are very very hard to dislodge. I have a lot of experience 
with this.


> Let's just remove it. What it does now is fool people into thinking this is for 
> when you want to release your library/application. If nothing else, it should be 
> renamed to -removesafetychecks or something.

It's simply not apparent from the documentation the path to the fastest code. 
Nobody doing a quick benchmark is going to try -removesafetychecks.


> Note, I was wrong about the -O and -inline being implied -- you still have to 
> put those in. -release just gets rid of all the safety checks.

Are you sure? It says in the documentation they are.