Re: What is faster Ada or C?

["Gisle Sælensminde" <gisle@apal.ii.uib.no>]

In article <3c08314d$0$158$9b622d9e@news.freenet.de>, Heiko Hamann wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I have a program written in Ada that is very processor intensiv. It does bit
> and integer operations. What would you guess is the faster languages for
> this task? Ada or C - or another language (excpet Assembler)? Can that be
> said in common? What is about some benchmarks concerning this case?
> 

It depends on the compiler. Both Ada and C makes it possible to write
efficient code, given a good compiler. If Borland C++ is used to compile
the C code, and GNAT is used to compile the Ada code, The Ada program 
will probably be faster, because GNAT has a better optimizer. If the 
Ada compiler is Aonix and the compiler used to compile the C code is
Microsoft C++, the C program will usually win. 

This is in general, and will not always be true. The numbers comes from 
my experirience from optimization using these compilers, including things
like dumping the assembly output to see which code the compiler emits.
My point is that compilers is more important than the language, especially 
when you compare two system programing languages like C and Ada. 

I have used C++ compilers as example, which arguable can be said to
be incorrect, given that C (no longer?) is a subset of C++, but I don't 
think it will make my point invalid in this case.

Another important point is that before optimization makes sense, the program
have to be correct and stable. That is easier to archive in Ada than C,
because all the unsafe features of C.

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

With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not
necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going
to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly
overhead. (from RFC 1925)