RCONN@SIMTEL20.ARPA (Rick Conn) (03/06/85)
You bring up lots of good points. I've been becoming greatly involved with Ada, and, with the current state of the Ada compilers, I've gotten into a mode of not considering code efficiency and considering more the readability, modularity, maintainability, etc of the code and the application of object-oriented programming design methodology. However, if you turn around and look at the size of the object code, on the Data General MV10000, for example, I commonly see 150K+ and 300K+ executable images being generated from my little 200 or 1000 line programs. DEC Ada has been quite a different story, with 15K EXE files poppng up from similar code (altho I suspect something large is coming in at execution since I commonly see 10K+ page faults during a run). I haven't studied the question in enough detail to give more than this cursory exam, and I suspect that as the Ada compiler technology matures, we will find more efficient code generation. It will be very interesting to see what the ALSYS 8086 and 68000 efforts generate. It will also be interesting to see what happens when compilers load only those parts of a package that they need rather than the whole package; right now, it looks like the DG loads all of TEXT_IO, and this has got to be a lot of code. Anyway, we will see with time. Ada is targeted to embedded applications and processors, and my current idea of such a processor is NOT a VAX 11/780 with 2G bytes of disk. Ada is such a neat language when you don't look at the code sizes that I hope this problem can be overcome. Rick -------
RCONN@SIMTEL20.ARPA (Rick Conn) (03/06/85)
By the way, there is an Ada Repository now on SIMTEL20 if anyone wants to take a look at Ada source. It's surprising how readable it can be even if you don't know Ada -- writing in Ada is where the language knowledge comes in. The repository is in MICRO:<ADA> (ADA.CRCLST is at this level>, and the subdirectories MICRO:<ADA.COMPONENTS> and MICRO:<ADA.TOOLS> contain software. There is a mailing list that you can subscribe to by sending a request to ADA-SW-REQUEST@SIMTEL20 if you want to be kept posted on new submissions. A large set of tools, the NOSC toolset, will be added to the repository over the next few months, and this includes things such as virtual terminal packages (ala the UNIX TERMCAP perhaps), FORMS generators, spelling checkers, style checkers, etc. Rick -------