On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 11:47:47PM +0100, Sean Kelly wrote: > On Friday, 6 December 2013 at 22:20:19 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: > > > >"there is no way proper C code can be slower than those > >languages." > > Didn't Bjarne cover this in his C++ performance talk at SD West in > 2007? Templates alone can make C++ and D code faster than even > hand-optimized C. And that doesn't even consider some of the other > points you mentioned.
The thing is, what constitutes "proper C" is not well-defined, because since C translates to machine code (as does C++ and D), in theory *everything* has access to the same level of performance -- that is, the hardware. So arguably, no matter what code fragment you may present in C++ or D, there's always a corresponding C code fragment that performs equally fast or faster. But that obscures the fact that said C code fragment may be written in an unmanageably convoluted style that no one in their right mind would actually use in practice. (And the same can be said for C++ and D: use asm blocks, and you'll beat any "normal" C code, but that proves nothing since the whole issue is writing *idiomatic* C vs. *idiomatic* D, not writing things in an unnatural way just so you can lay claim to the title of best performance.) T -- No! I'm not in denial!
