On Thursday, 31 July 2014 at 06:46:19 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
On Wednesday, 30 July 2014 at 19:50:35 UTC, Jonathan Marler
wrote:
I like the discussion. I do want to remind everyone that
OPTLINK is very fast and switching to a different linker will
likely result performance hit.
Wouldn't it be easier to optimize a linker written in D than
tinker with optlink?
No matter how much you optimize your D code, you will only ever
be able to use a subset of what assembly can do. That being
said, writing perfect assembly code is impossible, so we rely on
the compiler to take our higher level concepts and have it decide
on the best way to optimize. The beauty of higher level
languages is you can make high level changes resulting an a
cascade of optimizations. But the downside is sometimes changes
can have cascading adverse affects as well. One of the things I
like about D is that it does a much better job of allowing the
programmer to tell the compiler the "right" information it needs
to know how to optimize.
I would like to see a linker written in D and see how it compares
to optlink. But I would reserve making a decision on moving to
another linker until I got some solid performance data. Some
performance data for a D linker compiled with all three D
compilers as well.
