Re: Java vs Ada 95 (Was Re: Once again, Ada absent from DoD SBIR solicitation)

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

    Kenneth Almquist (ka@socrates.hr.att.com) said:

  > There may be no distributed overhead, but there certainly is overhead.
  > Here are some numbers from a toy benchmark:

  >	Ada with Unbounded_String:  10.02 seconds
  >	Icon (interpreted):          1.45 seconds

    First, nice benchmark.

    Second, do you have another version of gnat around?  If not 3.07
should be available soon.  This is one area where the reference
vs. value calling sequence pessimization is probably heavily felt, so
earlier (and later) versions of gnat should do better.

    Will it beat the Icon time?  I don't know, but certainly if it
doesn't the performance "problem" may occur other than in the gc
routines.  Even if Unbounded_String is implemented with a Controlled
type, clever optimization using RM rules only requires memory
allocation and freeing three times total.  (Finalization and the value
copies must occur, but there is no requirement to allocate new memory
when the new object is the same size, see 7.6(21).)

--

					Robert I. Eachus

with Standard_Disclaimer;
use  Standard_Disclaimer;
function Message (Text: in Clever_Ideas) return Better_Ideas is...