bearophile wrote:
At 14.42: You compare the performance of a D compiler with the performance of
a C++ compiler. But Delphi compiler was/is very fast (and probably the
FreePascal compile too), I have never "waited" for my Delphi (ObjectPascal)
code to compile. I think on average it takes only two thousand clock ticks to
compile one line of ObjectPascal code. It sounds a lot, but it means that
with a modern single-core CPU you can produce your binary file from a one
million ObjectPascal lines long program in less than two seconds.
ObjectPascal type system looks a bit simpler than D one (despite it has OOP,
generics, modules, inline asm, dynamic strings, records, all basic D types,
etc), so this isn't a fully apple-to-apple comparison.
Some context is in order. The talk was given at Google and aimed at what would
be interesting to Googlers. Google uses C++ extensively, and Rob Pike (of Go)
listed as a motivator for Go the compile speed problems with C++. Rob made a
point of how fast Go compiled code, and Go's compile speed has been praised a
lot on Reddit as well.
Andrei put together a benchmark that shows that D compiles 4 times faster than
Go.
As far as I know, Google has no interest in Delphi or ObjectPascal, so how those
compilers perform is irrelevant.
