On 1/25/2013 11:46 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> So I think at this
> point it's fair to say that GDC's back end produces superior code in
> terms of performance.

If you're feeling ambitious, taking a closer look to see why would be most interesting.

On 01/26/2013 02:37 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
> If you're feeling ambitious, taking a closer look to see why would be most
> interesting.

It's nice if DMD can produce faster code, but in the short term I'd rather see priority being given to making the frontend/druntime more easily portable to different backends.

The speed issues of DMD have never bothered me, precisely because GDC and LDC exist -- and besides speed, there's also the issue of target architectures.  The problem is rather having to wait for bugfixes and new features to propagate to the D compilers which already solved the speed and architecture issues.

On Saturday, 26 January 2013 at 15:17:18 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> ...

++

Once situation with front-end bugs and stability is settled, I see zero reasons to use dmd back-end and spending efforts on its optimization feels not pragmatical.

On 01/26/2013 04:26 PM, mist wrote:
> Once situation with front-end bugs and stability is settled, I see zero reasons
> to use dmd back-end and spending efforts on its optimization feels not pragmatical.

Actually, I feel somewhat the contrary.  When the problem of frontend/runtime portability has been solved, then it makes plenty of sense to look at DMD speed and backend issues.  Improving DMD is always a good thing -- it's just a question of priorities.

Yes, of course, we all have our own preferences, that is fine :) I mean a bit different thing: front-end efforts affect all major compiler lovers, not only one group and thus are more important.

On 01/26/2013 04:43 PM, mist wrote:
> Yes, of course, we all have our own preferences, that is fine :) I mean a bit
> different thing: front-end efforts affect all major compiler lovers, not only
> one group and thus are more important.

Yup, agree. :-)

I use DMD and GDC. DMD for debug builds and (since it is the
reference compiler) to ensure language conformance. GDC for
performance tests and release.
In other terms, I don't expect the W3 reference browser to be
the fastest, but to set the required standard for HTML
interpretation.
If you asked me, I'd keep all smart compiler optimizations
out of DMD for sake of stability, compilation speed and
maintenance effort.
Some of what GCC does is amazing, but probably requires heaps
of difficult to read code. (I once saw it SSE optimize my code
where I was using a 4-byte struct with 3 used bytes that I did
computations on in a loop.)

-- 
Marco