On 5 January 2012 16:49, Manu <turkey...@gmail.com> wrote: >> D is not a compiler, it is a language. Furthermore it is not true that >> DMDs backend is rubbish and there are already more backends than just the >> DMC backend. > > > Sorry, I was generalising a little general in that claim. And where I say > 'rubbish', I was drawing comparison to the maturity of C compilers for x86, > which STILL have trouble and make lots of mistakes with centuries of man > hours of work. > DMD has inferior code gen (there was a post last night comparing some > disassemblies of trivial programs with GDC), will probably never rival GCC, > that's fine, it's a reference, I get that. > But to say that using GDC will magically fix code gen is also false. I'm not > familiar with the GCC code, so I may be wrong, but my understanding is that > there is frontend work, and frontend-GCC glue work that will allow for back > end optimisation (which GCC can do quite well) to work properly. This is > still a lot of work for a small OSS team. > I also wonder if the D language provides some opportunities for optimisation > that aren't expressible in other languages, and therefore may not already > have an expression in the GCC back end... so I can imagine some of future > optimisations frequently discussed in this forum won't just magically appear > with GCC/LLVM maturity. I can't imagine Iain and co extending the GCC back > end to support some obscure D optimisations happening any time soon. >
Actually, it's just me. ;) So far I have come across no D optimisations that aren't supported in GCC. Infact, most of the time I find myself thinking of how I can use obscure GCC optimisation X to improve D. One example is an interesting feature of Fortran, though written with C++ in mind. Seems like something that could be right up D's street. http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?art_group=digitalmars.D&article_id=147822 -- Iain Buclaw *(p < e ? p++ : p) = (c & 0x0f) + '0';
