Study: build times for D programs

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Hello,

I was talking to Walter on how to define a good study of D's compilation 
speed. We figured that we clearly need a good baseline, otherwise 
numbers have little meaning.

One idea would be to take a real, non-trivial application, written in 
both D and another compiled language. We then can measure build times 
for both applications, and also measure the relative speeds of the 
generated executables.

Although it sounds daunting to write the same nontrivial program twice, 
it turns out such an application does exist: dmdscript, a Javascript 
engine written by Walter in both C++ and D. It has over 40KLOC so it's 
of a good size to play with.

What we need is a volunteer who dusts off the codebase (e.g. the D 
source is in D1 and should be adjusted to compile with D2), run careful 
measurements, and show the results. Is anyone interested?


Thanks,

Andrei