Re: Suitability of Ada as a general-purpose language

[Brian Drummond <brian@shapes.demon.co.uk>]

On Mon, 30 Jul 2012 08:26:23 -0700, Dufr wrote:

Of these two languages, I see Ada as stable or increasing in usage, and 
with better long term prospects.

> However, I have not been able to make up my mind on one point: would I
> have to pay a penalty in terms of performance and efficiency if I
> decided to use a large language like Ada, even if only a subset of it?

In performance terms you will lose nothing with Ada, and probably come 
out ahead vs Pascal. (There are probably fewer people caring about Pascal 
tools and tuning them.)

Executable size is a poor measure of efficiency; the Ada runtime system 
(RTS) provides a LOT of facilities that "Hello World" doesn't need. Any 
decent sized application will need them, whatever language it is written 
in. 

It is probably not worth crafting a specially small RTS just to make Ada 
look good on "Hello World" benchmarks! However it could be done... the 
AVR-Ada compiler for tiny embedded processors has effectively no RTS, and 
I am seeing executables of 1K or so to control two stepper motors (Arduino 
+ Motorshield).

> Also, would there be really so much syntax overhead (verbosity, for
> one), even if I decide to use only a subset of the language (leaving out
> advanced features like concurrency etc)?

Versus Pascal : not much. Versus C or Perl? A lot but it's worth it :-)

- Brian