On Tuesday, 18 August 2015 at 12:37:37 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev
wrote:
I think stability of the DMD backend is a goal of much higher
value than the performance of the code it emits. DMD is never
going to match the code generation quality of LLVM and GCC,
which have had many, many man-years invested in them. Working
on DMD optimizations is essentially duplicating this work, and
IMHO I think it's not only a waste of time, but harmful to D
because of the risk of regressions.
Well, you have to admit that it's pretty impressive that dmd's
backend gets within 30% of those monumental backends despite
having pretty much only Walter working on it sporadically. If
it's a waste of time to work on compiler optimizations because of
existing work, you could have said the same to the llvm devs when
they tried to take on gcc. As ponce said, people are always
going to use dmd because of it's speed, no reason not to make its
codegen better also.
Also, soon the dmd compiler backend will be the only one written
in D. :) No reason to not also make it better. Of course, Walter
is the only one who can decide the best use of his time.
