RE: is ada dead?

[Vinzent Hoefler <vinzent@MailAndNews.com>]

Original Message From "Jean-Pierre Rosen" <rosen@adalog.fr>
>"Vinzent Hoefler" <vinzent@MailAndNews.com> a écrit dans le message news:
3B5F53D1@MailAndNews.com...
>> future). I'm still doing ancient, but f* fast assembly code and to tell you
>> about some success with that "consider it to be dead, too"-language, I got
a
>> 50-60 _times_ (5,000%) speed improvement last week compared to some old
>> code.
>>
>Well... Recently, I improved some code from one of my clients 50 times too -
by
>replacing convoluted Ada code by better Ada code.

That's cool. And probably you did a much better job then.

>Not to diminish the value of what you are doing -

Oh no, writing it wasn't that hard. The hard work was still done with pencil
and paper to figure out the algorithm. The fact is that Assembly just does a
much better job in simple bit shuffling with floating point variables than a
dumb compiler that always decides to use floating point instructions with
such
ones[*] and does not even really know of 64-bit mantissas or of the
existance
of quite strange 24-bit floating point formats at all. Not to mention the
little/big endian problem.

Expressing those in HLL would have become more unreadable than the less than
40 lines of well commented assembly that probably no-one is ever looking at
again once it is working.

[*]Bad side effect of strong typing, I guess. ;-)))

>just another example that you can get tremendous speed-ups by doing the right
>thing, irrespective of language.

Yes. First improve the algorithm. That's what I really did in the end. Just
chose a better suited language. :-)


Vin"Writing too much, should work on my device driver."zent.