Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping language)

From: Jerry Coffin (jcoffin_at_taeus.com)
Date: 02/14/04 

Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 14:54:20 -0700

In article <402A29B4.3010807@noplace.com>, nobody@noplace.com says...
> Given that it is 100% legal Ada to build a procedure that contains
> nothing but assembly language instructions, I'd be confident that one
> could build Ada code that is just as fast as anything produced by any
> compiler anywhere. So if one wants to get into high-speed shootouts
> between languages, a ground rule has to be that you're comparing similar
> code.
>
> If an Ada example uses a high level abstraction of a matrix and C can't
> do that sort of abstraction, then C can't play in that game. If the C
> example uses some raw chunk of memory and address arithmetic, then the
> Ada example would need to be coded up in that style as well (and yes,
> that can be done - but nobody who uses Ada typically *wants* to. :-)
> Only if you have similarly coded examples can you possibly hope to
> determine if one compiler is more efficient than another.

IMO, this produces a benchmark that is so far departed from the real
world that while it may produce results that are accurate (for some
definition of the word) they're utterly devoid of relationship with
reality, and therefore of any real meaning.

If you want to do a comparison, you need to compare things how they're
really used. There are certainly variations among programmers, but to
be meaningful the test code should fall well within the range of normal
variations. We all know that "real programmers can write Fortran in any
language", but writing Fortran in Ada, C++, Java, etc., doesn't really
accomplish much, and the performance of such code is meaningless at
best, and more likely to be downright misleading. 

-- 
    Later,
    Jerry.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

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