Re: BLAS

[gisle@gribb.ii.uib.no (Gisle S�lensminde)]

In article <391F18DF.C4699276@maths.unine.ch>, Gautier wrote:
>Larry Kilgallen:
>
>> Unfortunately a published comparison would likely only be made
>> on the basis of performance or features.  I heard the author
>> Mark Minasi speak last October about problems in the software
>> industry, and he pointed out that magazine comparisons with a
>> two-dimensional array showing features of competing products
>> was exactly what drove vendors to emphasize new features rather
>> than quality.  There is a famous quote from Bill Gates saying
>> that new features are the only thing that sells new versions
>> of software (not better quality).
>
>Well - the market in question is not one where our friend Bill
>is very present. And there: performance is essential!
>
>> I realize that performance is one aspect of "quality",
>> but I think the more important one is "correctness".
>
>Do I understand well ?! You seem to oppose quality and correctness.
>As a DEC Ada user, you have the example of a product where
>quality and correctness meet rather well, don't they ?...
>
>> I don't like the idea of Ada people being sucked into the
>> mainstream error of considering only that which is most
>> easily measured rather than that which is most important.
>
>You seem to fear a comparison on performance. But some Ada
>compilers _do_ produce performant code! Those which don't should
>be improved! Ada is known to have nice, unique features around typing
>and security, but people often say: "ok, nice, but it means
>slower code doesn't it ?" If you can say: "The wonderful Ada
>has such, such and such marvelous features _AND_ this compiler
>and that one produce code so fast that you need a bigger fan
>for the CPU", where is the problem ?...

In cryptography, performance is also an importent issue, and in
the ongoing contest for the Advanced Encryption Standard(closed for
comments today), I implemented one of the candidates (Serpent) in Ada. This
is currently the fastest publicly available compiled version of this cipher
in any language, and the implementaion has popped up in several of the
tables for performance comparission. Ada has been mentioned as one of the
languages for which the cipher can be efficently implemented, besides C.

Compared to using gcc C frontend, there is certainly no drawback
using GNAT. I think that the best way of geting people
belive that it's possible to write efficient code in Ada, is to write
efficient code in Ada. 

--
Gisle S�lensminde ( gisle@ii.uib.no )   

ln -s /dev/null ~/.netscape/cookies