Attractive Chaos is a bioinformatics programmer's blog with benchmarks and C code on hash tables, sorting, matrix multiplication, and language performance.
HN commenters point to its hash table library comparison and khash.h, its matrix multiplication post, and its take on the D language.
> Dart will not be 2x (or more) faster than JS.
Why are you so sure of this? The people involved appear to be big believers that dynamic languages can be extremely performant provided they are designed with the VM in mind. LuaJit proves this out. A simple 1000x1000 matrix multiply in LuaJit is already 20x (not 2x!) faster than V8 and on par with C.
http://attractivechaos.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/amazed-by-luajit/
http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2009-06/msg00071.html
I think far too much emphasis is being placed on whether Dart replaces JS in the browser. Google would gain a huge amount by having a performant server-side language that can be tooled and compiled to JS for the client.
> D went from a language that I remember back in 2015 was often promoted on places like reddit and here as a fresh alternative to C++ that was constantly evolving
I wrote a blog post in 2012 about D [1]. In my personal experience, the high point of D was around 2008-2009. It was already declining in popularity in 2012, IMHO, due to intense clashes within the D community and the rise of Go, Rust and C++11 outside the community. D remains one of my favorite languages but I agree with you that Rust, Nim or Zig is the better choice for most programmers today.
[1] https://attractivechaos.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/timeline-of-the-d-programming-language/
As pointed out in the other comments on this thread, this benchmark benchmarks mostly standard RNG performance, not quality of the code generated by each compiler. Here you've got much more computationally intensive benchmark, showing that D is "as fast as C" like it could be said about Java: http://attractivechaos.wordpress.com/2013/04/06/performance-of-rust-and-dart-in-sudoku-solving/
It is close, but Java is just as close, too. Not a tremendous performance advantage that someone would choose one over another for and not something I'd expect from a language marketed as "performance oriented".
I'm the author of Tdoku and maintainer of those benchmarks.
If anyone has a well optimized DLX implementation I'd love to add it to the comparison. The few I've sampled from github were not competitive, but I have no idea how much effort when into them.
This page from 2011 has some comparisons of backtracking and DLX solvers from that era, but it would be interesting to update:
https://attractivechaos.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/an-incomplete-review-of-sudoku-solver-implementations/
In case anyone is looking for other novel ways to solve Sudoku. I wrote a CP language a while back that does pretty fast solving for the right kind of problem [1]. Folks might also find this Sudoku benchmarking blog post interesting [2], it includes links to solutions in a bunch of languages.
1) http://sabrlang.org/sudoku
2) http://attractivechaos.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/an-incomplete-review-of-sudoku-solver-implementations
Also there is the header-only khash.h [3], complete with benchmarks:
https://attractivechaos.wordpress.com/2008/08/28/comparison-of-hash-table-libraries/
(Also provides kbtree.h, ksort.h, kstream.h, kvec.h)
[3] https://attractivechaos.wordpress.com/programs/
Also there are the stb header-only libraries. There is a hash table implementation buried inside stb.h
[4] https://github.com/nothings/stb