On Thursday, 25 May 2017 at 06:22:28 UTC, Jon Degenhardt wrote:
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.
Maybe as a more casual observer the article did feel more like
Python vs D. I have not yet read the ycombinator comments, just
from my personal observation after reading the article.
My thinking was:
- Python its PyPy is surprising fast.
- Surprised that D was slower in version 1.
- Kind of surprised again that it took so many versions to figure
out the best approach.
- Also wondering why one needed std.algorithm splitter, when you
expect string split to be the fasted. Even the fact that you need
to import std.array to split a string simply felt strange.
- So much effort for relative little gain ( after v2 splitter ).
The time spend on finding a faster solution is in business sense
not worth it. But not finding a faster way is simply wasting
performance, just on this simple function.
- Started to wonder if Python its PyPy is so optimized that
without any effort, your even faster then D. What other D
idiomatic functions are slow?
I am not criticizing your article Jon, just mentioning how i felt
when reading it yesterday. It felt like the solution was overly
complex to find and required too much deep D knowledge. Going to
read the ycombinator comments now.
Off-topic:
Yesterday i was struggling with split but for a whole different
reason. Take in account that i am new at D.
Needed to split a string. Simple right? Search Google for "split
string dlang". Get on the
https://dlang.org/phobos/std_string.html page.
After seeing the splitLines and start experimenting with it. Half
a hour later i realize that the wrong function was used and
needed to import std.array split function.
Call it a issue with the documentation or my own stupidity. But
the fact that Split was only listed as a imported function, in
this mass of text, totally send me on the wrong direction.
As stated above, i expected split to be part of the std.string,
because i am manipulating a string, not that i needed to import
std.array what is the end result.
I simply find the documentation confusing with the wall of text.
When i search for string split, you expect to arrive on the
string.split page. Not only that, the split example are using
split as a separate keyword, when i was looking for
variable.split().
Veteran D programmers are probably going to laughing at me for
this but one does feel a bit salty after that.
