Re: A farewell to Ada

[schmidt@PARIS.ICS.UCI.EDU]

In article <14033@grebyn.com>, ted@grebyn (Ted Holden) writes:
>Ada is what you might expect from a programming language designed by
>committee;  it is unbelievably slow, an unbelievable resource hog,
>involves constant dilemmas over which is the real OS today, Ada or UNIX,
>Ada or Dos etc. i.e. do we use Ada tasking, again frighteningly slow, or
>ordinary UNIX tasking and inter-process communication, Ada source control
>or SCCS, etc.  Naturally, the Ada task manager and the UNIX process
>scheduler clash.  As for compiling, my experience has been that, with a
>PC and lots of memory to play with, Ada compilers at least will get back
>to you on the same DAY;  on a UNIX machine with ten other users doing
>various other kinds of things, God forbid other Ada compiles, forget it.

Along the same lines, lately I've heard a number of people make the
claim that:

  `There now exist Ada compilers that produce faster code than C/C++
  compilers.'

Naturally, taken out of context this statement doesn't mean very much,
since one can always find a lousy C/C++ compiler and an application
that brings out the worst in the compiler and vice versa for Ada.

Therefore, I'm curious to know what valid empirical studies have been
performed to compare `x' Ada compilers against `y' C/C++ compilers
across a representative set of benchmarks.  Furthermore:

1. Which `top-of-the-line' Ada compilers produce the best code?
2. How long do they take to compile non-contrived programs?
3. What are their resource constraints and requirements?
3. How reliable are they in practice?
4. And how much do they cost compared to `top-of-the-line' C/C++ compilers?

Without evidence of this sort the entire `language imperialism' debate
becomes egregiously religious.

Obviously, ``speed-of-generated-code'' or ``length-of-compile-time''
are not the only criteria by which to judge the success or failure of
a language.  However, since Ada supporters are beginning to make these
claims I'd like to see some supporting evidence!

thanks,

  Doug