On 12/7/2013 12:13 AM, qznc wrote:
However, I think the original statement is also true in the technical sense. The
same argument can be made with assembly. It is impossible to beat "proper"
hand-written asm, where proper means "only theoretically possible". In practice
I agree with you that optimizing a D program should be easier than optimizing a
C program.
"there is no way proper C code can be slower than those languages."
It's the qualifier "proper". You say that means theoretically possible, I
disagree. I suggest that proper C code means code that is presentable,
maintainable and professionally written using commonly accepted best practices.
For example, I've seen metaprogramming done in C using the preprocessor. It
works, but I consider the result to be not presentable, not maintainable, and
unprofessional and not a best practice.
For another, Maxim suggested that it was easy in C to use D style
length-delimited strings instead of 0 terminated ones. It's certainly
theoretically possible to write such a string type in C, but it ain't easy and
your result will be completely out of step with anyone else's C code and C
libraries, which is why people don't do it.
For another, how many times have you seen bubble sort reimplemented in C code?
How about the obvious implementation of string searching? etc.? I've seen that
stuff a lot. But in D, using a best-of-breed implementation of quicksort is easy
as pie, same with searching, etc. These kinds of things also make D faster. I've
translated C code into D before and gotten it to run faster by doing these sorts
of plug-in algorithm replacements.
