Re: Why does Ada compile slower than Python?

[Victor Porton <porton@narod.ru>]

Victor Porton wrote:

> Why does Ada compile much slower than Python, even in absence of
> optimization?
> 
> We can usually get a Python source files and immediately run it.
> 
> But with Ada we would need to wait a considerable amount of time till it
> compiles.
> 
> Why?

Hm,

$ time gnatgcc -c test.adb 

real	0m0.068s
user	0m0.064s
sys	0m0.000s
$ time python3 test.py
XXX


real	0m0.040s
user	0m0.032s
sys	0m0.004s


-- test.adb
with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;

procedure Test is
begin
   Put_Line("XXX");
end;


# test.py
print("XXX\n");


$ gnatgcc --version
gnatgcc (Debian 7.2.0-8) 7.2.0

According this test (valid only for very short programs) compiling Ada is 
slower only two times.

Maybe I was under a wrong impression, because I got this impression when I 
compiled tens of Ada files in a row and my brain was focused on total 
compilation time rather than compilation time for one file?

Is GNAT really much slower than Python? or was it a false impression?

This issue is quite practical: I am going to build a server which will 
execute (in a secure sandbox) XML converters downloaded from the Web written 
in different interpreted languages. By "interpreted" I mean "compiling 
quickly". Can we agree to count Ada as an interpreted language in this 
sense?

-- 
Victor Porton - http://portonvictor.org