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From: wr@polly.informatik.uni-dortmund.de (Wilfried Rupflin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.beta
Subject: Re: BETA questions
Date: 14 Mar 1995 10:00:59 GMT
Organization: CS Department, Dortmund University, Germany
Lines: 69
Sender: wr@polly (Wilfried Rupflin)
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <3k3pgr$cub@fbi-news.informatik.uni-dortmund.de>
References: <3jq90s$ojp@belfort.daimi.aau.dk> <3jqf0a$2on@netnews.upenn.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: polly.informatik.uni-dortmund.de

In article <3jqf0a$2on@netnews.upenn.edu>, wziller@math.upenn.edu writes:
|> In article <3jq90s$ojp@belfort.daimi.aau.dk> Wilfried Rupflin  
|> <wr@polly.informatik.uni-dortmund.de> writes:
|> > >How fast is BETA (executable speed)...compared to Eiffel and C++?
|>                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
|> 
|> > [...] The BETA compiler (written
|> > almost entirely in BETA) takes for compiling and statically
|> > linking a BETA program with significantly more than 1000 LOC and
|> > including Motif and other libraries less than 3 minutes on an old
|> > and slow SparcStation.
|> 
|> I didn't mean how fast are BETA compilers at compiling code, but rather
|> how  
|> fast is the code produced when run compared to the speed of Eiffel and
|> C++.
|> 
Typical programs nowadays spend most of the time not in CPU but waiting
for
external events/devices (disk IO, user input, network ...). So even if
there
is a significant difference in the efficiency of compiled code you won't
recognize this difference. That's why I've taken as a reference the BETA 
compiler which is also a program generated by the BETA compiler.

I guess that the generated code might be several times slower than that
generated by a good C/C++ compiler -- but you won't recognize the
difference unless you consider heavily cpu bound programs like numerical
computations.


|> How is it that you say that BETA's compilation speed is faster than
|> Eiffel.   
|> Have you tried out ISE's Eiffel implementation with Melting Ice
|> technology?   
Sorry, I was not quite correct on that point: I have no experience with
the
latest version of ISE's compiler, only with previous versions and SIG's
compiler. So my statement was related to these systems only. To give you
an idea of compilation speed (polly is a rather old SPARC IPC):

wr@polly(/tmp/wr){109}: time beta oggetto
Mjolner BETA System version 5.0(2) for SUN-4
Target machine type sun4
Building dependency graph for: 'oggetto' ...
Parsing: 'oggetto'
Translating fragments ...
Open: '~beta/containers/current/sets'
Open: 'collection'
Open: 'container'
Open: '~beta/basiclib/v1.4/betaenv'
Basic BETA environment: '~beta/basiclib/v1.4/betaenv'
Bind fragments in: 'container'
Bind fragments in: 'collection'
Bind fragments in: '~beta/containers/current/sets'
Bind fragments in: 'oggetto'!Checking!Code generation.
assembling /tmp/wr/sun4/oggetto..s
Linking
Object program on file: oggetto
3.7u 4.4s 0:19 41% 0+1708k 102+55io 383pf+0w

Compilation of one compilation unit is a matter of *significantly*
less than a minute anyway ...


|> p.s. Why is the traffic on this newsgroup so LOW?
I asked the same questions myself. I suspect that articles
are lost  --  how con one proof this?