billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe, 2847 ) (10/04/89)
>>> Well how come ADA seems to be largely irrelevant outside of the defense >>> sector? >> >>It is not really. But current Ada compiler technology produces large slow >>code. > % Well, I'm not an Ada person, but current Ada compiler technology % does *not* produce large, slow code. I used to use the Telesoft % VAX/VMS Ada compiler; even without global optimization, it produced % code comparable to the other VMS compilers (which are all fairly % mature and produce excellent code). % I haven't used many other Ada compilers, but VAX Ada also appears to % do a pretty good job of code generation. Telesoft produces some outstanding optimizing compilers; when the TeleGen2 compiler came out for the Suns last year, the code it produced was BETTER THAN that produced by any then-existing C compiler. (This may still be the case today; I haven't kept up with the situation...) There were several articles in the proceedings of Tri-Ada '88 describing the advanced optimization technology in just this one compiler. Other vendors are working to achieve similar results. Simple benchmarks aside, one of the major things this compiler is doing is reaching through the programmer-impenetrable levels of abstraction to achieve inter-package global optimizations; anyone who is seriously interested in compiler optimization technology should read some of those articles from the Tri-Ada '88 proceedings. I think there has also been some work in recent ASPLOS (Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems) proceedings about microprocessors which are specifically designed for Ada 83. Bill Wolfe, wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu