Re: ada and multicore

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Of course, the caveat has to be that the compiler and possibly the 
underlying OS (if there is one - the RTK if not) has to have adequate 
support for multi-threaded applications or you're not going to realize a 
performance advantage. Naturally, this is also true for any other 
language that has some kind of multi-threading capability.

If one is truly interested in getting the advantages Ada can offer in 
terms of performance via multitasking, be sure to do adequate research 
up front and make sure you REALLY understand tasking & its possible 
implications. I've seen programs that have numerous tasks in them 
designed by people who probably didn't really understand what they were 
doing and they don't get a performance gain - or they take a performance 
hit.

Check the compiler & OS first. Start with *simple* uses of multitasking. 
Learn and understand what it does before trying to use it in critical 
applications.

MDC

tmoran@acm.org wrote:
>>What is a special benefit than c or c++ on multicore cpus?
> 
>   Ada has robust multitasking built in, which makes it simpler and more
> natural to write programs that take advantage of multiple processors.
> Ada programmers are thus also more likely to be comfortable with writing
> for multitasking.
>   In another thread here, some Ada versions of a simple word counting
> benchmark were compared to C versions.  But a multitasking Ada version,
> a simple modification of the straightforward single tasking version, was
> shown to run about 50% faster on a dual CPU system.

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