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Faster Command Line Tools in D

dlang.org

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Re: Faster Command Line Tools in D

#21

Post by mhh__ »

penpapersw wrote: post #12
mhh__ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is fairly obvious: dlang is a nicer language, by design. Go isn't meant to be particularly impressive on the language design/innovation front.

Honest question: what strengths does Go have over D? I became very proficient at Go several years ago, and was reading about D for hours and hours last night, and it looks like D is overall a much better language.

I can only give my own biased opinion: Go's only advantage is it's commercial adoption e.g. builtin in support in AppEngine and co. I am not referring to it's ecosystem: While gofix and friends are very good, D has similar tools available + the usual bells and whistles for IDEs.

By chance, I found (while looking for a rob pike quote) this article critiquing Go's design: It uses D to demonstrate it's arguments. http://nomad.so/2015/03/why-gos-design-is-a-disservice-to-in...

Re: Faster Command Line Tools in D

#22

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

penpapersw wrote: post #12
mhh__ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is fairly obvious: dlang is a nicer language, by design. Go isn't meant to be particularly impressive on the language design/innovation front.

Honest question: what strengths does Go have over D? I became very proficient at Go several years ago, and was reading about D for hours and hours last night, and it looks like D is overall a much better language.

I haven't actually used Go, but one of its big strengths seems to be that you get a binary with no dependencies (beyond libc I believe) at the end of it. You can just deploy it through a file copy and have it just work.

Re: Faster Command Line Tools in D

#23

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

chickenfries wrote: post #16
penpapersw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: what strengths does Go have over D? I became very proficient at Go several years ago, and was reading about D for hours and hours last night, and it looks like D is overall a much better language.

This is sort of what I'm wondering. Are the compile times as good as Go? Is the GC as good as Go, or do you end up having to do manual management to get similar performance to Go? What is the build tool ecosystem like (I found Go's to be the one part of Go that was not easy to pick up quickly)?

I've dabbled in D occasionally and the compile times are really fast. They're fast enough that they even have a version (rdmd) that basically acts like a scripting language.

See https://dlang.org/rdmd.html

Re: Faster Command Line Tools in D

#24

Post by mhh__ »

chickenfries wrote: post #16
penpapersw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: what strengths does Go have over D? I became very proficient at Go several years ago, and was reading about D for hours and hours last night, and it looks like D is overall a much better language.

This is sort of what I'm wondering. Are the compile times as good as Go? Is the GC as good as Go, or do you end up having to do manual management to get similar performance to Go? What is the build tool ecosystem like (I found Go's to be the one part of Go that was not easy to pick up quickly)?

D compile times are great for the reference compiler and ok for the other two. The GC is a bit of a mess, but still works well enough for most things thrown at it. D allows "manual management" C or C++ style (#include ).

D's goto build system is called dub, it also handles packages hosted on dlang.org: I know no defects or problems with it, it's pretty good.

Re: Faster Command Line Tools in D

#25

Post by chickenfries »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #23
chickenfries wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is sort of what I'm wondering. Are the compile times as good as Go? Is the GC as good as Go, or do you end up having to do manual management to get similar performance to Go? What is the build tool ecosystem like (I found Go's to be the one part of Go that was not easy to pick up quickly)?

I've dabbled in D occasionally and the compile times are really fast. They're fast enough that they even have a version (rdmd) that basically acts like a scripting language. See https://dlang.org/rdmd.html

This is awesome, thanks for the link. This is where I'll start when I have a good project to try out D.

Re: Faster Command Line Tools in D

#26

Post by qznc »

chickenfries wrote: post #16
penpapersw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: what strengths does Go have over D? I became very proficient at Go several years ago, and was reading about D for hours and hours last night, and it looks like D is overall a much better language.

This is sort of what I'm wondering. Are the compile times as good as Go? Is the GC as good as Go, or do you end up having to do manual management to get similar performance to Go? What is the build tool ecosystem like (I found Go's to be the one part of Go that was not easy to pick up quickly)?

D can be arbitrarily slow due to its meta programming features. The comparable feature for Go would be some code generation integrated into the build process. This difference makes it hard to compare.

For simple (non-meta-programming) code. Dmd and Go are in the same league with respect to compilation speed.

Btw compilation speed is the main reason for me to put off Rust and C++ and Scala. I cannot stand slow compilers anymore after using D for a while.

Re: Faster Command Line Tools in D

#27

Post by qznc »

ramses0 wrote: post #8

This article is trash. They start with "obvious" python at 12s, run it with pypy instead for 3s, and then rewrite and optimize a D version from 3s to 1s w/o attempting any further optimization of the python version(!?!). In my opinion omit all of the discussion on python and just talk about "how to optimize a D program" b/c that's what this article is.

In general, Python is slow (compared to C or whatever) because of excessive memory allocation and overuse of hash maps.

PyPy probably manages to optimize the hash map/method call lookups for these small programs, which explains the speedups. Removing memory allocations is still hard.

The D language provides finer mechanisms to control memory and data structures. This makes the language larger, but enables you to optimize if it becomes necessary.

Still, I agree and I would like to see a Python expert to optimize it.

Re: Faster Command Line Tools in D

#28

Post by lenkite »

penpapersw wrote: post #12
mhh__ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is fairly obvious: dlang is a nicer language, by design. Go isn't meant to be particularly impressive on the language design/innovation front.

Honest question: what strengths does Go have over D? I became very proficient at Go several years ago, and was reading about D for hours and hours last night, and it looks like D is overall a much better language.

Golang: Easy concurrency using go-routines, a (comparatively) good minimal latency GC, an excellent comprehensive and stable standard library and few bugs.

Dlang: Traditional concurrency (thread based), great generics implementation, nice algorithm/container libraries and C++ interop

Re: Faster Command Line Tools in D

#30

Post by maxpert »

Makes me wonder, how many people actually use D-lang in production. Specifically with HTTP stack what kind of numbers/performance benchmarks we are looking at? Other than toy projects is there a company out there running D on massive scale (millions per day)?
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