Re: ada paper critic

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

Dale Stanbrough wrote:
>>You are missing the entire point. We could sit here all day and come
>>up with weird constructions for each language in question that go slow
>>on some compilers. What matters when you talk about speed is how
>>quickly the code generated by your compiler runs your kinds of
>>applications. If there's an unbelieveably slow feature in there, and
>>that feature isn't used in this particular person's code in a tight
>>loop somewhere, its not going to have any impact whatsoever on their
>>percieved performance.
> 
> No, async abort requires the compiler to include all sorts of 
..
> it go slow, and async abort is one of them. Don't use it and your
> code goes fast. Even the presence of it in an if statement...


(sigh)

So you yourself admit this doesn't slow anything down unless its used. I 
know for a fact I've never used async abort, and I suspect if we took a 
poll, we'd find exceedingly few Ada programs in general use it. There 
are plenty of things in *any* language that you should avoid if you care 
about speed, so this is hardly unique to Ada. If its an obscure feature 
that's almost never used, why bring it up as something that "makes Ada 
go slow", particularly when C++ is chock full of such features?