On Thursday, 25 May 2017 at 05:17:29 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Any time one writes an article comparing speed between
languages X and Y, someone gets their ox gored and will
bitterly complain about how unfair the article is (though I
noticed that none of the complainers wrote a faster Python
version). Even if you tried to optimize the Python program,
you'll be inevitably accused of deliberately not doing it right.
The nadir of this for me was when I compared Digital Mars C++
code with DMD. Both share the same optimizer and back end, yet
I was accused of "sabotaging" my own C++ compiler in order to
make D look better !! Me, I just don't do public comparison
benchmarking anymore. It's a waste of time arguing with people
about it.
I thought you wrote a fine article, and the criticism about the
Python code was unwarranted (especially since nobody suggested
better code), because the article was about optimizing D code,
not optimizing Python.
Thanks Walter, I appreciate your comments. And correct, as
multiple people noted, a speed comparison with other languages
not at all a goal of the article.
The real intent was to tell a story of how several of D's
features play together to enable optimizations like this, without
having to write low-level code or step outside the core language
features and standard library.
--Jon
