Re: Suitability of Ada as a general-purpose language

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Le Tue, 31 Jul 2012 06:19:58 +0200, Randy Brukardt <randy@rrsoftware.com>  
a écrit:

> "Brian Drummond" <brian@shapes.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:jv70gq$v6u$1@dont-email.me...
> ...
>> 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.
>
> Right. We used to tell people that back in the early days of Ada, but few
> people bought that argument.

(playing the devil's advocate)

Does that mean that “not decently sized” applications are not Ada's  
target? Then, any one can define what “decently sized” is? It's not fair  
that when a compiler fails in an aspect (an aspect which is not relevant  
to its main audience, I agree), to get the point away with pretexts.

The Hello World program here, is a place‑holder for tiny applications.  
There may be good reasons for people to expect tiny applications to have  
tiny executable images: there may be a lot of them, whose size cumulates,  
and they may be launched often for a short time, in sequence; better a  
tiny executable image here. Then, the big Hello World image can give  
people an honest enough feeling of bloating or else poor dependencies  
management capabilities.

GNAT producing big executable images for tiny applications, and GNAT  
purpose not being at producing efficient executable image for that kind of  
application, is not a reason to push that issue away.

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University