On Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 06:57:01 UTC, Kai Nacke wrote:
On Wednesday, 17 February 2016 at 22:57:20 UTC, Márcio Martins
wrote:
I was reading the other thread "Speed kills" and was wondering
if there is any practical reason why DMD is the official
compiler?
Currently, newcomers come expecting their algorithm from
rosetta code to run faster in D than their current language,
but then it seems like it's actually slower. What gives?
Very often the typical answer from this community is generally
"did you use LDC/GDC?".
Wouldn't it be a better newcomer experience if the official
compiler was either LDC or GDC?
For us current users it really doesn't matter what is labelled
official, we pick what serves us best, but for a newcomer, the
word official surely carries a lot of weight, doesn't it?
From a marketing point of view, is it better for D as a
language that first-timers try the bleeding-edge, latest
language features with DMD, or that their expectations of
efficient native code are not broken?
Apologies if this has been discussed before...
Hi,
even if DMD is the official reference compiler, the download
page http://dlang.org/download.html already mentions "strong
optimization" as pro of GDC/LDC vs. "very fast compilation
speeds" as pro of DMD.
If we would make GDC or LDC the official compiler then the next
question which pops up is about compilation speed....
Regards,
Kai
I agree that there is potential for compilation speed to become
the new question, but I don't think it's very likely for
newcomers to have larger codebases to compile for compilation
speed to matter.
I suppose it's a lot easier to address the compilation speed
issue in LDC/GDC, than to improve and maintain DMD's backend to
the expected levels, right?
