Re: Ada vs. C++

["Marin D. Condic" <mcondic-nospam@quadruscorp.com>]

G wrote:
> 
>   Has anyone done any measurements on the different speeds and
> memory requirements of comparable applications written in C++
> and Ada95.  I am learning both languages.
> 
If your purpose is to select a compiler for a project with some sort of
time critical requirement then I would suggest that you find some
code/algorithms that are similar to the intended application (I/O
intensive, Math intensive, Memory intensive, etc.) and feed them through
a few compilers to see what you get. This sort of benchmarking can prove
useful and there may be some of that work done by various realtime
projects which folks might be willing to share.

If your question is more along the lines of "Which language is faster
and more memory efficient?" then I'm afraid you will get no useful
information on that subject. For benchmarking purposes, you cannot
separate the language from the implementation. One man's Ada compiler
may produce dramatically better code than another man's C++ compiler.
Likewise, the opposite. This really tells you nothing about either
language - just how well/poorly someone implemented the language.

This much can be said: There is nothing inherent in Ada that would make
it less efficient than C++. In some ways, Ada syntax is superior for
optimization purposes because more information is available to the
compiler. In other ways, Ada could be slower because of the requirements
for runtime checks. However, the language allows you to turn off runtime
checks if efficiency is a major concern. (When doing realtime control
systems, we routinely turned off checks and had code that was every bit
as efficient as that which could be produced by any other language.)

MDC
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