On Friday, 22 December 2017 at 10:06:18 UTC, Joakim wrote:
This one of the main strengths of D, it is what Walter focuses
on, yet I have seen almost nothing on the D blog talking about
this. What brought me to emphasize this today is this recent
post about how long it takes to compile the mostly-C++ Chromium
web browser and the reddit discussion about it:
https://lobste.rs/s/iri1te/chromium_has_compilation_time_problem
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7ktzog/chromium_has_a_compilation_time_problem/
I'm tempted to call BS on that 6-7 hour build time, as I used
to contribute to the Chromium project, and I think it used to
take me 20 minutes for a release build in a FreeBSD jail on a
fairly weak, 2008-vintage mini-desktop, a dual-core Celeron
with 2 GBs of RAM (don't hold me to that build time, just a
vague recollection, but probably in the ballpark). Of course,
the last time I built Chromium was more than 5 years ago, and a
lot has likely changed since then, such as now using LTO to
speed up the browser apparently, and maybe the
cross-compilation toolchain for ARM is slower, though others
note similar times for native x64 compilation also.
That still implies a slowdown of 2-3 orders of magnitude over
the last 5 years, given the much more powerful hardware he's
using, which is nuts.
D really needs the community to write blog posts talking about
how fast it is, publicizing that there is an alternative to
these glacial build times: who wants to do this? It doesn't
need to be on the D blog, could just be on your personal blog,
but it is a message that really needs to be spread.
If this ever happens, what will be published will have to be
based on LDC2.
If benchmarks based on DMD are published, the article will be
subject to the criticism that is that the shorter build time is
due to the optimization pass, since it's known not to be super
deep in DMD backend.
