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D has its own backend (or it used to at least) which is lightning fast. No comparison what so ever to C++ or Rust, much much faster. And that's with D having much more powerful metaprogramming than either.

Zig is similar in that regard, if you don't use the LLVM backend it is stupidly fast despite the insane amount of metaprogramming it supports.

I did an unscientific comparison more than 1 decade ago... yep D was pretty fast (at least compared to g++). Of course FPC was faster.

BTW, there are several D compilers:

- DMD (the de-facto compiler written by Walter). Previously written in C++, now is self-hosted. It has it's own code codegen.

- LDC (using LLVM)

- GDC (using GCC)

D is one of the very few languages that maintain its own backend, they have full control, and it is very fast, that's why I still use D, despite its problems