Re: Newbie Questions

[Chris Yocum <cyocum@gmail.com>]

Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> Chris Yocum schrieb:
>> Hi Everyone,
>>     I have been playing with GNAT and Ada for a little bit (GNAT 4.2.1 
>> (Ubuntu 4.2.1-5ubuntu6) on Ubuntu 7.10).  I have successfully written 
>> a doubly linked list with generics so I think I am starting to have a 
>> feel for the language.  However, my binaries have always seemed a bit 
>> large compared to my C/C++ ones for similar data structures.  I looked 
>> in the Wikibook FAQ about it and it instructed me to look at the 
>> various compiler options.
> 
> The most important instruction should likely be to consider
> how many bytes are important, really. For very small Ada
> programs, the size of the run-time system might matter.

I had considered this but the Wikibook says 
(http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Basic#FAQ:_Why_is_.22Hello.2C_world.21.22_so_big.3F) 
that this program should be on the order of 8K rather than the 21K that 
I am getting out of just a plain gnatmake.

> 
> 
>> ~/adastuff/testhello$ gnat make -Phello.gpr
>> gcc-4.2 -c -O3 -gnatn -funroll-loops
> 
> Loop unrolling is not necessarily reducing code size,
> if this is your goal?
> 
>> -fPIC -fprofile-arcs
> 
> Have you had a look at Chapter 9 of GCC 4.1, gcov? This
> chapter should also have some info about the __gcov_* messages.

Thanks for the info.  I will look more closely at what you suggest.  The 
unroll-loops was something that I copied out of Wikibook gpr file so I 
had not looked very closely at it.  Thanks again.

Chris