Re: Ada bench : count words

[jtg <jtg77@poczta.onet.pl>]

Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> 
> BTW, I think that this challenge is wrong because it does not filter I/O
> issue out. In real-life applications it is not Text_IO (or its equivalent
> in any other language) which is the bottleneck. Text_IO could be 10 times
> slower and still impose no or little problems, because string processing in
> the true sense, is usually 1000 times slower.
> 
IMHO the challenge is OK. Look at the system commands (in UNIX). In
many cases text I/O performance is crucial. But since
existing commands are very fast, nobody even thinks about it.
Recently I had to write some simple programs in C (after years of pure
Ada) and I/O performance was my biggest problem. I compared my I/O
results with wc command and wc was substantially faster than my
pure I/O! So I downloaded
the code and looked into it. That was mess&magic. They must have
spent much time to get really fast I/O, and they had a good
reason for it.
I think that instead of blaming the challenge we must face reality:
this test indicates that existing implementation of Ada is worse than C
in pure I/O applications (like system commands). Maybe instead of
improving the program it would be better to look into the GNAT
source and improve things there. Or to notify GNAT team about the
problem. It would not only give Ada better
position in this challenge, but also speed up text I/O operations of
all the programs compiled with future versions of GNAT.