How fast is D compared to C++?

Question

I like some features of D, but would be interested if they come with a runtime penalty?

To compare, I implemented a simple program that computes scalar products of m

Answer 1

This is a very instructive thread, thanks for all the work to the OP and helpers.

One note - this test is not assessing the general question of abstraction/feature penalty or even that of backend quality. It focuses on virtually one optimization (loop optimization). I think it's fair to say that gcc's backend is somewhat more refined than dmd's, but it would be a mistake to assume that the gap between them is as large for all tasks.

Answer 2

To enable all optimizations and disable all safety checks, compile your D program with the following DMD flags:

-O -inline -release -noboundscheck

EDIT: I've tried your programs with g++, dmd and gdc. dmd does lag behind, but gdc achieves performance very close to g++. The commandline I used was gdmd -O -release -inline (gdmd is a wrapper around gdc which accepts dmd options).

Looking at the assembler listing, it looks like neither dmd nor gdc inlined scalar_product, but g++/gdc did emit MMX instructions, so they might be auto-vectorizing the loop.

Answer 3

Seems like a quality of implementation issue. For example, here's what I've been testing with:

import std.datetime, std.stdio, std.random;

version = ManualInline;

immutable N = 20000;
immutable Size = 10;

alias int value_type;
alias long result_type;
alias value_type[] vector_type;

result_type scalar_product(in vector_type x, in vector_type y)
in
{
    assert(x.length == y.length);
}
body
{
    result_type result = 0;

    foreach(i; 0 .. x.length)
        result += x[i] * y[i];

    return result;
}

void main()
{   
    auto startTime = Clock.currTime();

    // 1. allocate vectors
    vector_type[] vectors = new vector_type[N];
    foreach(ref vec; vectors)
        vec = new value_type[Size];

    auto time = Clock.currTime() - startTime;
    writefln("allocation: %s ", time);
    startTime = Clock.currTime();

    // 2. randomize vectors
    foreach(ref vec; vectors)
        foreach(ref e; vec)
            e = uniform(-1000, 1000);

    time = Clock.currTime() - startTime;
    writefln("random: %s ", time);
    startTime = Clock.currTime();

    // 3. compute all pairwise scalar products
    result_type avg = 0;

    foreach(vecA; vectors)
        foreach(vecB; vectors)
        {
            version(ManualInline)
            {
                result_type result = 0;

                foreach(i; 0 .. vecA.length)
                    result += vecA[i] * vecB[i];

                avg += result;
            }
            else
            {
                avg += scalar_product(vecA, vecB);
            }
        }

    avg = avg / (N * N);

    time = Clock.currTime() - startTime;
    writefln("scalar products: %s ", time);
    writefln("result: %s", avg);
}

With ManualInline defined I get 28 seconds, but without I get 32. So the compiler isn't even inlining this simple function, which I think it's clear it should be.

(My command line is dmd -O -noboundscheck -inline -release ....)

Answer 4

dmd is the reference implementation of the language and thus most work is put into the frontend to fix bugs rather than optimizing the backend.

"in" is faster in your case cause you are using dynamic arrays which are reference types. With ref you introduce another level of indirection (which is normally used to alter the array itself and not only the contents).

Vectors are usually implemented with structs where const ref makes perfect sense. See smallptD vs. smallpt for a real-world example featuring loads of vector operations and randomness.

Note that 64-Bit can also make a difference. I once missed that on x64 gcc compiles 64-Bit code while dmd still defaults to 32 (will change when the 64-Bit codegen matures). There was a remarkable speedup with "dmd -m64 ...".

Answer 5

You can write C code is D so as far as which is faster, it will depend on a lot of things:

• What compiler you use
• What feature you use
• how aggressively you optimize

Differences in the first aren't fair to drag in. The second might give C++ an advantage as it, if anything, has fewer heavy features. The third is the fun one: D code in some ways is easier to optimize because in general it is easier to understand. Also it has the ability to do a large degree of generative programing allowing things like verbose and repetitive but fast code to be written in a shorter forms.

Answer 6

Whether C++ or D is faster is likely to be highly dependent on what you're doing. I would think that when comparing well-written C++ to well-written D code, they would generally either be of similar speed, or C++ would be faster, but what the particular compiler manages to optimize could have a big effect completely aside from the language itself.

However, there are a few cases where D stands a good chance of beating C++ for speed. The main one which comes to mind would be string processing. Thanks to D's array slicing capabalities, strings (and arrays in general) can be processed much faster than you can readily do in C++. For D1, Tango's XML processor is extremely fast, thanks primarily to D's array slicing capabilities (and hopefully D2 will have a similarly fast XML parser once the one that's currently being worked on for Phobos has been completed). So, ultimately whether D or C++ is going to be faster is going to be very dependent on what you're doing.

Now, I am suprised that you're seeing such a difference in speed in this particular case, but it is the sort of thing that I would expect to improve as dmd improves. Using gdc might yield better results and would likely be a closer comparison of the language itself (rather than the backend) given that it's gcc-based. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if there are a number of things which could be done to speed up the code that dmd generates. I don't think that there's much question that gcc is more mature than dmd at this point. And code optimizations are one of the prime fruits of code maturity.

Ultimately, what matters is how well dmd performs for your particular application, but I do agree that it would definitely be nice to know how well C++ and D compare in general. In theory, they should be pretty much the same, but it really depends on the implementation. I think that a comprehensive set of benchmarks would be required to really test how well the two presently compare however.