Re: speed of generic code in Ada (vs Java)

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

"Robert A Duff" <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com> wrote in message 
news:wcc1w3seile.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com...
> "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> writes:
...
>> The net effect is that generalizations about Ada performance are probably
>> not well-founded. Usually, Ada performance is similar to that of C++, but
>> implementation differences can be a big deal and more different than 
>> those
>> between languages.
>
> I disagree.  Performance of Ada is pretty-close to C and C++ in most
> cases.  Performance of Ada is better than Java (and Smalltalk and ...)
> in most cases.  The implementation matters, but the language rules
> matter more.

You haven't used a wide enough variety of Ada compilers if you say that. 
Janus/Ada in particular. :-) The performance characteristics of Janus/Ada 
are very different than GNAT, on a variety of things: generics, 
discriminanted records, exceptions, tasking, just to name a few. (Sometimes 
better, sometimes worse.) Another example would be the old AdaEd compiler, 
where the result was always interpreted.

I agree that the language characteristics have a role to play (especially 
things that require dynamic memory allocation, implicitly or explicitly), 
but the implementation differences also matter a lot. I'd expect that a 
highly optimized Java JIT compiler would beat AdaEd on most measures, for 
example.

                             Randy.