Re: Gurus - which lang. for this task?

[eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)]

In article <3g0rc9$o4j@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM> claird@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM (Cameron Laird) writes:

  > ... except for its suitability for prototyping.  Ada
  > has had a bad reputation in that regard.  Does it
  > still suffer from multi-day link operations?  Under-
  > stand, please, that I'm a "friendly", looking for
  > reasons to learn more about Ada.

     As one of those who fought taking this "feature" out of the
language, I feel duty bound to answer this.  At MITRE we found that
whenever an Ada project start slipping due to "long link times," the
problem was always traceable to major design flaws that would prevent
completion of the project.  (Since MITRE's main job is acting as a
technical advisor to the DoD on procurements, we get to see a lot of
projects in trouble.)  In every case, where fixing things was possible
(technically and otherwise), a few weeks spent restructuring the
design brought the schedule under control.  In particular not only did
global recompiles drop from days to hours, they usually also went back
to once per major build, and the programmers spent a lot less time
fighting forest fires.

     So, if your Ada project has unacceptably long link times, C or
Fortran is not the answer--in cases where this type of code switch was
seriously attempted, the same design changes were needed.  The answer
is to find out why every compilation needs to with in (tranitively)
several hundred library units.

     On one project we found a unit that was "withed" by over 600
units, and had over a hundred with clauses of its own.  Argh!

--

					Robert I. Eachus

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