Re: Interesting performance quirk.

["Peter C. Chapin" <pcc482719@gmail.com>]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:

> I believe OpenSSL uses hand-written and carefully optimised assembly
> for its inner loops.

That's interesting. It would help to explain the speed difference...
although as I said I'm sure I can do better, at least a little better,
with the compiled Ada than I am currently.

In any event I don't want to "resort" to assembly language or to
removing the Ada mandated checks (at least not in the final version). My
assumption is the the sort of person who would be interested in using a
crypto library in Ada would have that interest precisely because of the
safety afforded by the Ada language. This is why I'm content with the
library being a bit slower than the competitors that are throwing safety
to the wind by, for example, using assembly language.

Considering that cryptography is, almost by definition, used in security
sensitive programs it seems like issues of safety and correctness should
take priority over raw efficiency. Fast is good, of course, but it's
even more important to be both right and secure. Hence Ada and not C
(and definitely not assembly language).

> Besides that, I was wondering if by any chance you were using one 32-
> bit and one 64-bit operating system; if so, which one is Linux and
> which one is Windows?

No, they are both 32-bit systems. The Linux VM is on the same hardware
as the Windows system.

Peter