On Thursday, 9 June 2016 at 13:32:14 UTC, Dave wrote:
I think you can trust benchmark. I think the bigger key is understanding what you are truly benchmarking.
I agree with your general point, but what I find most useful about benchmarks is the ability to find the lower bound of performance without resorting to inline asm or making the program ugly as sin.
If you can find, "In this particular task, D has these tricks it can use to make it really fast", I think that's useful as many other languages won't have those options. You can see how much you as a programmer can optimize the hot points in your code and how easy that is to do just by looking at the benchmarked code.
Appender!string is a great example, as it's easy to add and it almost always results in measurable speed increases. You can see how one simple change using D features can make your program 5% faster.
Every language has idiomatic uses to speed up your program, the real question is how much faster those make the code and how easy it is to implement those in your own code.
