Why Ada, Ada Success story?, Please read an comment

[sdd.hp.com!usc!nic!jonesm@hplabs.hpl.hp.com (Matthew Jones)]

A year ago we started work on a software application. It was to be
in Ada (defense market), would be realtime and use the parallel
processing. The machine that we purchsed was Unix based, shared 
memory, multi processor that would load balanced Ada tasks over
multiple processors. Well after a year we would like to be able to
claim success, but that is not exactly what we got. Note: The Ada was a
Verdix port.

After a year I came to the following conclusions:

	1. Ada compiler is good, generally not quit as fast a C
	   but really close.
	2. Text_IO is a mess.
	3. Ada Development tools especially the debugger is
	   not very good.
	4. Ada tasking runtime is a mess.
	5. Parallelism is a failure.
	6. Since C is more widely used the product generally has 
	   less bugs, and the Beta test has more participants.

	
	Discussion

1. The Ada compiler after comming out of Beta has been pretty good.
   For some proposals we compared it against C. I think this unfair
   because it causes a lowest common denominator in term of design.
   C generally won out but Ada did run faster on some machines most notably
   Ada VAX/VMS.

2. TEXT_IO generally ran slower than C printf and has alot less
   functionallity. I am willing to show examples if someone cares to
   challange this. Like write a hex dump with text_io.

3. We had a debugger called a.db and it has problems, wierd things
   happened when I stepped through instantiations of a generic.

4. The bad problems started here. It takes way to long to do a 
   rendezvous. We have just a lot more bugs in this area.

5. Even today a year after we brought Ada still load balancing on
   parallel processors doesn't work. 

6. Customer service sayes that for their products they have many more
   C customers and C is simpler therefore the product gets mature
   faster. This makes alot of sense. Consider, Microsoft I've heard
   had 50,000 beta customers for C/C++ Version7.0. How many do Alsys
   and Meridian have for their PC Ada compilers.

7. I believe someone made the claim that C++'s dynamic memory was wierd.
   While this may be true I think a similar claim can be made for Ada.
   We did a lot of dynamic memory allocation in our Ada application
   and there were raised exception and handlers at various levels,
   we found it amazingly easy to cause very hard to find problems,
   by mixing these two features.


	Questions

1. Can anyone really claim that there exists a machine that load balances
   Ada tasks over multiple processors?

2. Do or did the Ada designers have even a clue as to how parallel
   processors work? If so, why do multiprocessor venders have so much t
   rouble with Ada?

2. Does anyone NOT find Ada tasks to be too slow for realtime use?

3. Do people generally find all the advertised features to work as
   advertised?

4. Does anyone like text_io?

5. Is Verdix considered a good Ada company?

6. I thought I've read read that Ada is more consistant than other languages.
   If so, then please explain how "a: array (1..5) of integer" is okay 
   as a variable definition and not for parameter passing?

7. If anyone knows of a resource information on parallel Ada, I'd
   appreciate them litting me know.

I wish I could specify the vendor of our machine, but I feel it is
not best to do so.

Matthew Jones
jonesm@cerf.net
Litton Data Systems