From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,UTF8 Path: g2news2.google.com!news4.google.com!feeder.news-service.com!newsfeed.freenet.de!newsfeed01.chello.at!newsfeed.arcor.de!newsspool4.arcor-online.net!news.arcor.de.POSTED!not-for-mail Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 08:51:50 +0200 From: Georg Bauhaus Reply-To: rm.tsoh+bauhaus@maps.futureapps.de User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 (Windows/20090605) MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.functional,comp.lang.c++,comp.programming Subject: Re: Alternatives to C: ObjectPascal, Eiffel, Ada or Modula-3? References: <2009a75f-63e7-485e-9d9f-955e456578ed@v37g2000prg.googlegroups.com> <0bdf3c02-0565-40e2-95cc-c7f5eb546313@2g2000prl.googlegroups.com> <7xmy6mzy0q.fsf@ruckus.brouhaha.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-ID: <4a714308$0$30229$9b4e6d93@newsspool1.arcor-online.net> Organization: Arcor NNTP-Posting-Date: 30 Jul 2009 08:51:52 CEST NNTP-Posting-Host: 65c3c363.newsspool1.arcor-online.net X-Trace: DXC=WV9XfMHdf80RLigj];iP=8ic==]BZ:af>4Fo<]lROoR1^YC2XCjHcb948SASO@aB94A:ho7QcPOV3mb;MnJ4h0j=?3:[bgN3Eg> X-Complaints-To: usenet-abuse@arcor.de Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.scheme:6192 comp.lang.ada:7437 comp.lang.functional:2543 comp.lang.c++:48602 comp.programming:12149 Date: 2009-07-30T08:51:52+02:00 List-Id: fft1976 wrote: > On Jul 29, 7:48 pm, Paul Rubin wrote: >> fft1976 writes: >>>> Where'd you get that idea? >>> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=allāŒ©=gna... >> Given that Ada is such a verbose language, the generally smaller >> source sizes of the Ada programs suggests that they weren't optimized >> very carefully. I know that some C, Java, and functional language >> users treat the shootouts fairly competitively and tune their code >> carefully, but I don't know if the Ada users are the same way. Ada >> is unfortunately kind of a niche language these days. > > This is a hypotheses you are entertaining, right? Or did you notice > anything "suboptimal" in the Ada code? It is true that Ada programs have been ranking lower at the Shootout than they did before, and the (two) reasons are interesting. Some time ago, many algorithms were supposed to use just the language, and sequential programs, with few excceptions. Now with Multicore CPUs everywhere, many Shootout programmers have started to include threading libraries and thus perform different algorithms, having their programs perform devide and conquer and such. (One might wonder whether or not having concurrency support built into the language will become the great new thing. :-) Last time I looked, the Ada programs had not been updated to use Ada's concurrent types to express the same devide and conquer strategy, which seems to be allowed now... The reported speedups for some C versions of the programs can be used as an estimate of a statistical correction to the (still sequential) Ada performance. This then will explain why a 2x slowdown of Ada, when compared to C, is not a realistic estimate. A second reason why Ada has dropped at the Shootout is that the systems they use have older interim (from the Ada point of view) GCCs that are known to be broken. This makes some perfectly normal Ada programs fail there. As the code is available and did not fail when it was first ranked, and does not fail when used with an apt compiler like GCC 4.3.x, the Shootout is just showing its information potential ;-)