Recently I ported a simple ray tracer I wrote in C++11 to D.
Thanks to the similarity between D and C++ it was almost a line
by line translation, in other words, very very close. However,
the D verson runs much slower than the C++11 version. On Windows,
with MinGW GCC and GDC, the C++ version is twice as fast as the D
version. On OSX, I used Clang++ and LDC, and the C++11 version
was 4x faster than D verson. Since the comparison were between
compilers that share the same codegen backends I suppose that's a
relatively fair comparison. (flags used for GDC: -O3
-fno-bounds-check -frelease, flags used for LDC: -O3 -release)
I really like the features offered by D but it's the raw
performance that's worrying me. From what I read D should offer
similar performance when doing similar things but my own test
results is not consistent with this claim. I want to know whether
this slowness is inherent to the language or it's something I was
not doing right (very possible because I have only a few days of
experience with D).
Below is the link to the D and C++ code, in case anyone is
interested to have a look.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/974356/raytracer.d
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/974356/raytracer.cpp
