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From: brett@ada9x.enet.dec.com (Bevin R. Brett)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions
Date: 8 SEP 94 14:47:33 EST
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
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References: <aetechca.3.000FE9D9@powergrid.electriciti.com>
 <1994Sep7.155252.14027@ocsystems.com> <34n3mk$3c8@theopolis.orl.mmc.com>
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Date: 1994-09-08T14:47:33-05:00
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In article <34n3mk$3c8@theopolis.orl.mmc.com>, dennison@romulus23.DAB.GE.COM (Ted Dennison) writes...

>I wouldn't worry too much. I implemented a program in Sun (Verdix) Ada 
>and then translated it to GNAT (our customer site has no liscence for
>Sun Ada). GNAT's executable ran about %20 slower.
...
>For you legal types, the program made heavy use of floating-point 
>math and very heavy use of disk I/O. Neither executable was compiled
>with optimizations.


It is REALLY SILLY to compare the execution times produced by two different
compilers for the same platform WITHOUT TURNING ON THE OPTIMISER!

All you are doing is measuring what the two different compiler teams thought
should done in the NoOptimise, and this bears NO RELATION AT ALL to the
quality of code that they will generate with the optimiser enabled.

Such poor benchmarking techniques, followed by the wide dissemination of the
results, are a major source of false information in the computer business.  It
is being practised by individuals, companies, and even trade magazines; and all
it does is cause totally bogus impressions of machines, languages, and compilers
to become "common knowlege".

/Bevin