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

[Dave Froble]

On 11/16/2021 9:47 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 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..

Lipstick on a pig, huh ???


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