[Info-vax] ADA and VMS (was Safer programming languages)

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 11/16/2021 7:15 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 11/15/21 9:23 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 11/15/2021 8:44 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>> On 11/15/21 7:35 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>> On 11/15/2021 6:28 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>>>> On 11/15/21 4:18 PM, Robert A. Brooks wrote:
>>>>>> ACME_SERVER and SECURITY_SERVER are written in ADA.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Both are being rewritten in C.
>>>>>
>>>>> Were there ever any internal benchmarks run against them so that
>>>>> a comparison of performance when the C conversion is done could
>>>>> be looked at?
>>>>
>>>> Depending on how many checks were disabled in the Ada version, then
>>>> the C version may be a little or a lot faster,
>>>>
>>>> But I cannot imagine it having any significance on modern hardware.
>>>>
>>>> They did not rewrite in C to save CPU cycles but because they did
>>>> not have an Ada compiler for the new platform.
>>>
>>> I realize all that.  I would just like to see some comparisons.
>>> I don't know that any were actually done.  It all goes back to
>>> a comment I got from someone from the Ada Users Group about 30
>>> years ago.  I mentioned an interest in a version of Unix rewritten
>>> in Ada and was quickly informed that while it could be done it
>>> would result in a useless operating system because the Ada version
>>> would be very inefficient.  Needless to say, I never tried it.
>>> Might be fun to dig up some benchmarks and try it, but I always
>>> prefer real world examples to contrived benchmarks.
>>
>> But there are two very different questions here.
>>
>> Would Ada vs C for OS mean something 30 years ago (VAX 6000 and 3000)?
>>
>> Would Ada vs C for OS mean something today (16/24/32 core x86-64)?
> 
> Thus the reason we have so much bloatware today.  If the program
> runs badly, throw more cores at it. I am not interested in whether
> or not something ran faster or slower on todays machines vs. yesterdays.
> I am interested in whether or not ADD A TO B GIVING C is faster, slower
> or the same between Ada and C.( and other languages as well!) Throwing
> more cores at the above will not result in faster performance.
> 
> When I first started with programming we cared about programming and
> efficiency.  We profiled our programs in order to find the bad parts
> and we fixed them.  It is sad that efficiency is no longer considered
> important to software development today.  And they call it engineering
> while we just called it programming.

I would say that there is a lot of focus on efficiency today.

But there are two types of such focus.

There is the hacker/nerd crowd that focus on micro-benchmarks
of all sorts of things. ADD A TO B GIVING C will fit fine in
that.

And then there is the engineering/professional crowd that
focus on actual solution/system performance. But what measurement
in this area prove to be relevant has changed over the last 30 years.
Unless one is in a specialized area like HPC then ADD A TO B GIVING C
is not relevant for solution/system performance today. They are
looking for round trips between tiers, interpreted vs compiled,
data models etc..

Arne