On Thursday, 16 July 2020 at 23:36:58 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
On Thursday, 16 July 2020 at 15:56:45 UTC, Per Nordlöw wrote:
D's compiler `dmd` is still far ahead of all its competition
especially when it
comes to default build (standard compilation) performance.
I don't think this comparison is fair as dmd is far behind when
it comes to code generation compared to the competitors. What
should be included are benchmarks done with LDC as well. Since
you already have the D code, adding LDC should be pretty easy.
Both dmd and ldc have superior check stage (lexical, syntactic
and semantic analysis) because of a language designed in
conjunction with the needs and limitations of a compiler. One
key-property of such a design is that the D language is design to
be a so called, single-pass language.
The compiler dmd is superior because of a super-fast but less
qualitative code generation giving outstanding productivity
incremental development. At that stage in the development cycle
fast builds is much more important that optimized machine code.
The machine code generated by dmd in this stage is sufficiently
fast for the needs of the developer trying to be productive in
this stage. That is by design, not by accident. I suggest you ask
Walter Bright if you want more details around his design.
The compiler ldc is about 10x slower than dmd for the debug stage
because of the larger overhead of the LLVM-backend and is often
preferred when doing release builds.
