Re: Heap vs Stack allocation

["Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam@spam.com>]

Randy Brukardt wrote:

> That said, I think the more information that the programmer can provide the
> compiler about what they're doing, the better code that can be generated.
> I'm still convinced that, given a big enough budget, an Ada compiler can
> produce faster and smaller programs than that for any of the other
> "contenders". But you'd need an Ada-specific optimizer to take full
> advantage of the information that Ada provides, and it's probably not cost
> effective to create those.

There seems to be an existence proof for this: the Tartan Ada-83 compilers had 
excellent optimizers. It was a Tartan compiler that resulted in the "Ada Beats 
Assembler" article; the compiler produced smaller and faster code than 
hand-optimized assembler from a team of experts. There was also an interesting 
article on Tartan's benchmarks that they used to sell their C compilers. The Ada 
version was faster than the C version. The article listed the Ada features that 
allowed this. True arrays was one such feature.

I'm speaking from memory; I don't have the articles around. They were in /Ada 
Letters/ in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Go and boil your bottoms."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail
01