Re: Ada vs Java performance testing...

[Stephen Leake <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov>]

Michael Andersson <michael@ida.his.se> writes:

> Hi!
> This isn't realy a Ada question but I hope you can help me out any way.
> For my final year project I'm going to port my realtime 3d simulator,
> written in Ada using the OpenGL API, to Java and Java3D. The reason for
> this is that a company here in Sweden is interested in how the
> performance as well as design i affected when using Java3D instead of
> OpenGL. Could you give me any tips on how to compare to version of the
> same application written in different programming languges? Do you know
> of any good book on the subject?

This should be very interesting. However, it will be very difficult to
sort out the two changes; Ada -> Java and OpenGL -> Java3D. If
possible, maybe you could do it in two steps?

I don't have any specific tips to offer, but in general, you want to
define some benchmarks _now_, that you will run with the current
system and then with the Java system. You may also want to add some
benchmarks later.

Make the benchmarks meaningful. One typically quoted for graphics
stuff is polygons per second, but that will reflect the hardware more
than the software. So pick something top level, like "run this
simulation script start to finish". 

And be sure you use the _same_ hardware for the two systems!

And let us know how it goes!

-- 
-- Stephe