Re: Ada vs. C

[jerry@jvdsys.nextjk.stuyts.nl (Jerry van Dijk)]

The Quelisher (kendal@freenet.scri.fsu.edu) wrote:

: Robert Dewar wrote:
: > That's bogus, comparable programs in Ada and C will generate 
: > executables of the same size, at least using a technology like GNAT. 

: 		printf("Hello world! \n");

: 	  Put_line("Hello world!");

: When I compiled each of the above here are the file sizes that resulted:
: 	C ----> 24,576
: 	Ada -->	253,952

To me this looks like comparing a C program using shared libraries to a
statically linked Ada program...

Besides, what do you think you are comparing here ? With only one line
of executable code, the programs mainly consist of the program start-up
code and runtime library. And then I would expect the GNAT executable to
be somewhat larger then the C one, since the GNAT RTL contains more
functionality (like tasking).

If you really want to compare executable file sizes, you should use two 
equivalent programs, large enough to make size of the RTL insignificant
compared to the code size.

But, then, whats the point to it...

P.S. Under DOS a GNAT hello world is about 87K, a gcc one about 57K.
     If I were to use a 16-bit C compiler I would expect a 6K exe size.
     Using an embedded systems compiler would bring that down to about
     500 bytes. If that is still to big, handwritten assembler will
     get away with about 40 bytes.