Ada vs C

[vestal@SRC.Honeywell.COM (Steve Vestal)]

I want to note for those interested in such things a public-domain report
written by one Stephen Leake of the NBS (now NIST) in February of 1988 and
titled "A Comparison of Ada and C on Sun and microVAX" (document number
ICG-#8).  I will quote briefly from the summary, though of course the actual
report should be consulted.  I would appreciate any references to other
similar public-domain information based on actual comparisons, benchmarks,
etc.

     4.3 Timing.

     Currently, DEC Ada is faster than DEC C for forward kinematics, DEC C
     is faster for inverse kinematics, and Sun C is fastest overall.  This
     assumes we allow Ada to use single precision.  I believe this is
     justified; the SMACRO system has been running real robot applications
     for years using single precision.  If C were to be modified to allow
     single precision, it would become the clear speed leader. ...

     4.4 Overall Summary.

     On the whole, Ada was judged to be the best language for this
     application.  The degree of abstraction available made prototype
     debugging significantly easier, and the final speed was adequate,
     particularly on DEC hardware.  The Verdix compiler (and others) can
     be expected to improve, as demonstrated by the significant improvement
     from Verdix 5.41 to 5.5.
   

Steve Vestal
Mail: Honeywell S&RC MN65-2100, 3660 Technology Drive, Minneapolis MN 55418 
Phone: (612) 782-7049                    Internet: vestal@src.honeywell.com