Re: Ada95 vs Eiffel ?

[Jean-Marc Jezequel <Jean-Marc.Jezequel@irisa.fr>]

> Luis Ibanez (luisiban@club-internet.fr) wrote:
> 
> : I'm planning to develop a critical
> : application related with real time
> : visualization of 3D medical data.
 ...
> : I'm analyzing the alternatives of
> : good languages for this kind of
> : tasks. By now, the finalist are
> : Ada and Eiffel,:

Nice shortlist ;-)


> : Can anybody give me some advices
> : about this choice ?

>Tucker Taft answered:
> Echoing what others have said, Ada is specifically designed for
> real-time, safety-critical, embedded systems.  You can build
 ...
> By contrast, Eiffel depends fundamentally on dynamic allocation
> and garbage collection.  That can be very nice in a desktop environment,
> but can be troublesome in a resource-constrained, safety-critical,
> real-time environment.
 
Yes, this is true, but it actually depends on what you call "real-time". 
For, let say, so called "hard real time", Ada is superior to Eiffel. But
a really tiny fraction of all information systems are really HRT. And
even in those, most often only a small part of the overall system is
HRT. Fore example, very few telecom (sub)systems are HRT: most often you
can afford to sligtly miss a deadline once in a while without
catastrophic consequences. For this kind of system, Eiffel is worth
considering for its clean and simple implementation of the OO paradigm
(see e.g., my paper: "Object-oriented design of real-time telecom
systems" -- In IEEE International Symposium on Object-oriented Real-time
distributed Computing, ISORC'98, Kyoto, Japan, April 1998.
http://www.irisa.fr/pampa/EPEE/isorc.pdf)

Good luck, and please tell us of your final choice.

-- 
Jean-Marc Jezequel               Tel : +33 299 847 192         
IRISA/CNRS                       Fax : +33 299 847 171         
Campus de Beaulieu               e-mail : jezequel@irisa.fr 
F-35042 RENNES (FRANCE)          http://www.irisa.fr/prive/jezequel