On Thursday, 9 June 2016 at 14:16:08 UTC, Jack Stouffer wrote:
On Thursday, 9 June 2016 at 13:32:14 UTC, Dave wrote:
[...]
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.
Based off what you said, I'm not sure we disagree at all. :)
My main point is no what you are really benchmarking. And just
because you can make it go away doesn't mean it's not a problem
still. Especially if it's the way you are supposed to use the
language.
