On Thursday, 25 February 2016 at 23:48:15 UTC, Xavier Bigand
wrote:
IMO if Go is a fast compiler is just because dmd shows the way.
Go was designed to compile fast because Google was looking for
something faster than C++ for largish projects. The authors were
also involved with Unix/Plan9 and have experience with creating
languages and compilers for building operating systems...
Anyway, compilation speed isn't the primary concern these days
when you look at how people pick their platform. People tend to
go for languages/compilers that are convenient, generate good
code, support many platforms and resort to parallell builds when
the project grows.
You can build a very fast compiler for a stable language with a
simple type system like C that don't even build an AST (using an
implicit AST) and do code-gen on the fly. But it turns out people
prefer sticking to GCC even when other C compilers have been
10-20x faster.
