Re: Computer Language Shootout

["research@ijs.co.nz" <Craig Carey>]

On 3 Nov 2001 08:49:27 -0600, Kilgallen@SpamCop.net (Larry Kilgallen)
wrote:

>In article <cQSE7.11173$xS6.15277@www.newsranger.com>, Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com> writes:
>
>> The last time I read over that, its goals, methods, and conclusions
>> seemed so bogus that I didn't think it was worth participating. The
>> ideal language for them would be some compiled form of APL. Anything
>> that proports to compare languages in a general way and is stilted
>> towards APL isn't worth my time.
>
>Hey, at least they are at the proper end of the alphabet :-)
>
>Seriously, anything that gets the Ada name out there as being current
>is worthwhile.  If Ada comes out dead last in the terseness competition
>it will attract favorable notice from those who have ever had to read
>obfuscated code.


For the 'echo server' shootout, I coded up a solution, and Ada 95 was
going to be last since 251 lines long. This is the page on the "echo
server" shootout: the programs are expected to fork (or multitask) and
both send and receive bytes:

http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/bench/echo/


Adasockets could be replaced with the newly available GNAT Sockets
code. But that maybe would not make the code smaller.

http://gcc.gnu.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/gcc/gcc/ada/g-socket.ads?rev=1.2&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup

The lengthiest entry, the (forking) g++ code was about 129 lines long.

Maybe the G++ entry could produce zombies or core-dumps at run time:

   int sigchld = 0;
   void reaper (int sig) { sigchld = 1; }
 ...
      signal(SIGCHLD, reaper);
      if ((pid = fork()) == -1)
	    sysabort("server/fork");


The  Ruby solution is about 29 lines long. Ruby might even be 
initialising Winsockets (which could add maybe another 97
non-comment lines to any Ada 'echo' entry (bringing the total to
just over 300 lines).

I can e-mail out my echo server code to anybody else interested in
having Ada compete (i.e. lose) under a clean adjective-free
["stilted .. APL"] test where pairs of integers are compared.

The shootout could be altered (a committee investigates; hack his
site?), and these can be the new requirements

 * code must be fast with 0 run time error problems, when running on
    a slow CPU (this can eliminate Java easily: run time socket I/O
    errors creep in and make it maybe 5 times slower than Ada)
 * multitasking, requeue statements of each language demonstrated.
 * portability to Windows operating systems and no forking.
 * assembly inlining tests
 

I see that there is a TCP Stack coded in Java now:
 http://www.websprocket.com/