Are you really saying that a 1% performance loss makes something "not a systems programming language"? Of all the weird definitions of "systems language" I've heard this has to be the weirdest.
1% compared to what? Hand-written assembly? C? C++?
Clang and GCC differ by way more than 1% in most benchmarks. Does that mean that one of them can't compile system languages or something?
I mean, I would agree that there definitely is a performance threshold below which you wouldn't consider a language a "systems language" - i.e. it would be silly to write an OS in the language. But 1% seems at least an order of magnitude off.
I see D as a non-compromising language (in terms of eating your cake and having it too) and that's why I like it. I think the authors don't want to limit its performance at the design level. For equivalent code, they don't want it to only ever be able to run 99% as fast as C, they want it to be able to run, at least theoretically, as fast as C or better. That's probably where the 'systems language' comparison came from. In practice though, I'm willing to bet DMD,GDC and LDC result in more than 1% difference in performance (but that's just speculation).
1% compared to what? Hand-written assembly? C? C++?
Clang and GCC differ by way more than 1% in most benchmarks. Does that mean that one of them can't compile system languages or something?
I mean, I would agree that there definitely is a performance threshold below which you wouldn't consider a language a "systems language" - i.e. it would be silly to write an OS in the language. But 1% seems at least an order of magnitude off.