Re: Ada

["Marin D. Condic" <mcondic-nospam@quadruscorp.com>]

Andy Glew wrote:
> 
> > BTW: I don't see how this could be perceived as a handicap to Ada. It
> > provides a facility most other languages do not, yet if your application
> > has no need of it, there is no real penalty. How do you see it as a
> > barrier to using Ada?
> 
> (1) It was a barrier to ports.
> 
> (2) A long as there is absolutely no real penalty.

O.K., I can see #1 to a point. Ports to small microprocessors still
don't exist in any real numbers and some of this may be due to perceived
difficulties in getting tasking to work there.

#2 has the conditional: "It Depends" attached to it. Certainly for
compilers that target a capable OS with tasking primitives should not
exhibit any penalties for tasking when it is not used, since it is the
OS that holds all (most) of the code. For embedded targets where you
have to supply some sort of RTK, the question becomes "how good is the
compiler/linker at removing dead code?" Many modern linkers are pretty
good at eliminating subroutines that are never called. And of course, it
still comes down to the specific implementation. A poor quality compiler
for any language is going to create penalties and WRT Ada, there are
more opportunities to do so than in less sophisticated language.
However, there isn't anything inherent in the language design which
makes it impossible to generate efficient, tight code. There are many
Ada compilers which do so.

The trick is to do a good evaluation of the compilers available for the
application at hand and see what sort of code generation you really get.
Some are overall better than others. Each does some things well and
other things poorly. You always want to build some sample code similar
to the intended application and see what you get with a specific
compiler. This is true for any language.

MDC
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