Re: What is faster Ada or C?

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <3c08314d$0$158$9b622d9e@news.freenet.de>, Heiko Hamann says...
>I have a program written in Ada that is very processor intensiv. It does bit
>and integer operations. What would you guess is the faster languages for
>this task? Ada or C - or another language (excpet Assembler)? Can that be
>said in common? What is about some benchmarks concerning this case?

This gets asked here a lot. In truth, its a bad question. There really is no
such thing as a fast or slow language. A language can't have a speed, its an
abstract concept.

If you were to ask which language's compilers would, in theory, be able to
produce faster executables, the answer would be Ada. Ada's a lot more strict
than C, which means its optimizer has a lot more information to work with. 

However, this isn't the question you really care about the answer to. What you
need to know is which of your available compilers will you be able to create
faster executables with. The main variables here aren't language, but rather the
effort the various compiler writers put into optimization, and the quality of
*your* code.

For example, the Aonix Ada compiler has *no* user-visible optimization options
(last I checked anyway). Its intended audience appears to be Windows GUI
programmers, and speed just isn't as important to them as good Windows support.
I'm sure there are several Windows-based C compilers with this same philosophy.
Green Hills, on the other hand, produces Ada compilers with oodles of
optimization options. The same numeric computation code most likely going to run
much faster when compiled and properly optimized with a GreenHills x86 compiler
than with one of those others.

Gnat on the other hand, uses the same code generation back end as Gcc. Thus a
fair comparison between C and Ada code when both are compiled with GCC is liable
to show you no difference at all.

Also, large amounts of compiler optimization aren't liable to save you if you
perform slow operations with one language and faster ones with another. Your
algorithms have to be comparable, or all bets are off.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html

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