On Thursday, 16 May 2013 at 19:15:57 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
1. In general, if you want to operate on ASCII, and you want
your code to be
fast, use immutable(ubyte)[], not immutable(char)[]. Obviously,
that's not
gonig to work in this case, because the function is in
std.string, but maybe
that's a reason for some std.string functions to have ubyte
overloads which
are ASCII-specific.
I was thinking exactly about that. Only thing I want to be
advised on - is it better to add those overloads in std.string or
separate module is better from the point of self-documentation?
2. We actually discussed removing all of the pattern stuff
completely and
replacing it with regexes.
Is is kind of pre-approved? I am willing to add this to my TODO
list together with needed benchmarks, but had some doubts that
std.string depending on std.regex will be tolerated.
3. While some functions in Phobos are well-optimized, there are
plenty of them
which aren't. They do the job, but no one has taken the time to
optimize their
implementations. This should be fixed, but again, it requires
that someone
spends the time to do the optimizations, and while that has
been done for some
functions, it definitely hasn't been done for all. And if
python is faster than
D at something, odds are that either the code in question is
poorly written or
that whatever Phobos functions it's using haven't been properly
optimized yet.
I understand that. What I tried to bring attention to is how big
difference it may be for someone who just picks random functions
and writes some simple code. It is very tempting to just say
"Phobos (D) sucks" and don't get into details. In other words I
consider it more of informational/marketing issue than a
technical one.
- Jonathan M Davis
Thanks for your response, it was really helpful.
