"High Performance Tools in D" by Jon Degenhardt

Our long time member and friend Jon Degenhardt has graciously accepted to present on very short notice.

He will give a preview of some performance benchmarks that he has been running of tools in C, Rust, and Go that overlap with what Jon writes in D at eBay. Jon has been observing that D versions are faster in nearly all cases, and not by a small margin. In a total surprise, Jon's version of ‘cut’ is faster than GNU cut on large files: On a 4.8GB, 7M lines test file, GNU cut takes 12.4 sec, while Jon's version takes 4.2 sec. (GNU cut is faster on small files.)

The big take-away is that this was achieved without a lot of low-level coding, using mostly high level D primitives and the standard library. There was some tuning and lessons learned, but nothing extensive.