Re: Ada Compilers

[David Rasmussen <david.rasmussen@gmx.spam.egg.sausage.and.spam.net>]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> True, but misleading. GNAT and GNU C/C++ may all share the same back end &
> hence produce similar code for similar input programs, but that in no way
> says anything about how good the code is compared to some other compiler
> that works for either Ada, C or C++. Its theoretically possible that the gcc
> backend might generate really crappy code and hence Ada and C++ are equally
> bad. What does that tell you about the relative efficiency of Ada or C++?
> 
> This is why its totally useless to ask the question "How does Ada compare
> against C++ for efficiency...?" The best we can answer is that the Ada
> standard doesn't impose anything that is inherently inefficient for the
> semantic content delivered and the rest is a matter of comparing one
> compiler against another. There are efficient implementations of both Ada
> and C++. There are also bad implementations of both languages. We *really*
> need to educate developers (who *should* know this by the time they leave
> college!) that languages aren't "slow" - only implementations are.
> 

I know that, of course. My question was of a more pragmatic nature. Most 
languages (ML, Lisp, Java etc.) could have compilers that created as 
good code on a given platform (say x86), as the best C compilers for the 
same platform. But in real life, this is not at all the case. So my 
question was if, in practice, most Ada compilers generate code that is 
comparable to, say, C++ compilers. The question makes a lot of pragmatic 
sense.

/David