Re: Size of linked program increasing with new version of GNAT.

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

"Tony" <tony7@tele2.se> wrote in message 
news:c702cb35-a051-4a0b-b7e7-41384fb487e3@googlegroups.com...
> On Tuesday, December 30, 2014 12:56:43 AM UTC+1, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>> The size of Hello world tells one
>> very little about the size and efficiency of a real program.
>
> I have written about 600 Ada programs at home. The average size of the 
> programs are 75 lines of code.
> I never use tasks. These are my real programs.

Really? I'm skeptical that you can do anything useful in 75 lines of code. 
After all, you can't even open a file properly in 75 lines of code. (That 
is, getting the name from the user or the command line, and with appropriate 
error handling.) About all you can do in that size is write a throw-away 
program, and by definition, one doesn't care too much about the "goodness" 
of the result of a throw-away program. (Plus, you're depending on the 
implementation-defined error handling in that case -- and that's hardly 
going to be free.)

If you are "with"ing a bunch of library packages to and using them in the 75 
lines, your real program size has to count the size of the libraries that 
you "with". Which is going to be a lot more than 75 lines.

> "I never use tasks."

Which eliminates ONE form of overhead. But one cannot (sensibly) write an 
Ada program that doesn't use exceptions (from implicit checks if nothing 
else - and you need the unhandled exception mechanisms); finalization is 
used by many of the language-defined packages; virtually every program needs 
the default storage pool; and so on.

Sigh. Why I am I feeding the troll here? Gosh knows.

                                 Randy.


                                                        Randy.