On Wednesday, 7 December 2016 at 06:17:17 UTC, Picaud Vincent
wrote:
Considering scientific/numerical applications, I do agree with
Ilya: it is mandatory to have zero overhead and a
straightforward/direct interoperability with C. I am impressed
by the Mir lib results and I think "BetterC" is very
attractive/important.
As always, it depends on what you are doing. It is mandatory for
some numerical applications. R, Matlab, Python, Mathematica,
Gauss, and Julia are used all the time and they are not zero
overhead. A fast way to kill their usage would be to force their
users to think about those issues. What matters is the available
libraries, first and foremost, and whatever is second most
important, it is a distant second.
I write D code all the time for my research. I want to write
correct code quickly. My time is too valuable to spend weeks
writing code to cut the running time by a few minutes. That might
be fun for some people, but it doesn't pay the bills. It's close
enough to optimized C performance out of the box. But ultimately
I need a tool that provides fast code, has libraries to do what I
want, and allows me to write a correct program with a limited
budget.
This is, of course, not universal, but zero overhead is not
important for most of the numerical code that is written.
