Re: Sharing generic bodies across instantiations.

[Gene <gene.ressler@gmail.com>]

On Jul 26, 8:51 pm, "Peter C. Chapin" <pcc482...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It has been my understanding that Ada's generics are designed in such a
> way as to allow implementations to share the code of a generic body
> across all the instantiations. I understand that doing this might
> involve a performance penalty relative to creating independent code for
> each instantiation. However, I can see that there are cases where such
> sharing would be desirable.
>
> Is my understanding still accurate (was it ever accurate), for example
> even with Ada 2005?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Peter

I don't believe this is true.  Early compilers replicated code for
each instantiation even when they might have been able to share. But
I've read that the compiler is free to choose to generate
parameterized code that's highly sharable.  Yes, in that case the
implementation will generate smaller but likely to be slower code.

You may be thinking of java templates, which explicitly require that
code is shared among all instances.  This is much easier in Java due
to the reference semantics.