We should deprecate -release

[Sergey]

On Saturday, 13 July 2024 at 05:35:53 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Why -release is the way it is:
>
> I got sick of journalists running benchmarks using compilers 
> they weren't familiar with. They never spent any effort 
> learning what the switches were.
>
> The big vendors would wine and dine them and show them exactly 
> how to run their compilers. With mine, they never talked to me. 
> I wouldn't even know they did a review until it hit the news 
> stand.
>
> They'd use the wrong switches, the code would run slow, and I'd 
> get a bad review.
>
> The -release switch means "make the fastest code". Make it easy 
> for the journalists to do the right thing.
>
> Nobody new to D will know to use -O -boundscheck-safeonly 
> -inline. They'll just get a "D is slow" result and move on.

I'm not sure what are you talking about honestly.
First of all 'D benchmarker' here. So which 
impressions/observations I have based on my experience:
1) No journalists are interested in D... at all.
And 'D is slow' usually not because of the compiler or flags, but 
because Phobos/runtime/library implementation.
2) People sometimes adding D to their benchmarks, but most 
usually it is somebody from the community.
3) Community pretty aware of 'not using dmd in any benchmarks', 
but the problem not in this.
4) As many people already said the problem is in 'misleading' 
name. Because benchmarkers also sometime want to use 'the flags 
that will be used in production'. And many other languages have 
'release' flags exactly for these purposes:

Zig: "Standard optimization options allow the person running zig 
build to select between Debug, ReleaseSafe, ReleaseFast, and 
ReleaseSmall. By default none of the release options are 
considered the preferable choice by the build script, and the 
user must make a decision in order to create a release build."

Rust: "
$ cargo build
     Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.0s
$ cargo build --release
     Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 0.0s
The dev and release are these different profiles used by the 
compiler."

So Dub is doing fine with 'release' build option (having 
'release-nobounds' in case it is what developer wants) and also 
it is possible to configure the release build flags.