billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe, 2847 ) (03/13/90)
This article was originally posted to comp.software-eng, but
should have been posted to comp.lang.ada instead...
From article <1246@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov> [newsgroup comp.software-eng],
by xrtnt@amarna.gsfc.nasa.gov (Nigel Tzeng):
What I would like to know is whether Ada is fast enough for real time
processing? We dont have an Ada compiler here so I can't run any timing
tests... I have heard that the on board avionics for the upgraded A7 aircraft
was written in Ada (I have no idea if this is true) so there exists the
possibility that it is.
So the question : Can someone compare the relative "speed" of C and ADA?
This is of course compiler dependent but without efficient
optimizers ADA will be unsuited for the task.
The burden of proof lies on the ADA crowd as we already have many real-time
systems written in C. For real speed critical routines we further hand
optimize the C output. Is this easily possible in ADA or do most ADA
compilers generate poorly optimized code that require a lot of massaging?
Oh yes...on the other front...executable size...we are sometimes space limited
on the size of the programs we can have in the on-board systems...how do the
C vs ADA sizes compare?
This information is important to know...otherwise we cannot make an intelligent
decision on which language to use in the future. NASA is trying to figure out
if they should adopt ADA as the single official language. Developers at NASA
need to know the hard data in order to decide whether to support such a stand.
Nigel Tzeng xrtnt@csdr.gsfc.nasa.gov
STX Inc. xrtnt@csdr.span.nasa.gov