Re: Separate Compilation in Programming Languages

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Ray Blaak" <rAYblaaK@STRIPCAPStelus.net> wrote in message
news:uwsoq6khn.fsf@STRIPCAPStelus.net...
> Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com> writes:
> > > GNAT's library model lives on a different place on the tradeoff curve
as
> > > compared to the other Ada vendors. It allows some problems to be
avoided at
> > > the expense of suffering from other possible problems that the other
Ada
> > > vendors do not.
> >
> > What's the "suffering" you see here?
>
> None myself. I am speaking theoretically. There must be *some* advantage
to the
> library approaches the other vendors use, right? Right? :-)

At the user level, they all pretty much look the same. The differences
between Gnatmake and Corder (in Janus/Ada) aren't that significant - both
allow the building of a program and recompilation of any needed
dependencies. The details of the implementation are quite different, of
course, but that's not very relevant to using either compiler. And what I've
seen about other compilers also are pretty similar (ignoring some "advanced
capabilities" that hardly anyone would use).

There are big differences in the tradeoffs at the implementation level, and
those manifest themselves in terms of significant differences in compilation
speed, memory footprint, and needed disk space. (Although with the massive
disks and CPU speeds of today, those differences are much less important
than they used to be).

                                  Randy.