Path: news.daimi.aau.dk!poe From: jas@systematic.dk (Jacob Seligmann) Newsgroups: comp.lang.beta Subject: Re: BETA questions Date: 20 Mar 1995 12:04:30 GMT Organization: DAIMI, Computer Science Dept. at Aarhus University Lines: 43 Approved: mailtonews@daimi.aau.dk Distribution: world Message-ID: <3kjr0e$bm4@belfort.daimi.aau.dk> NNTP-Posting-Host: daimi.daimi.aau.dk In article <3k3pgr$cub@fbi-news.informatik.uni-dortmund.de>, Wilfried Rupflin writes: > 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. While Wilfried's statement is certainly true for a large class of applications, it is worth noticing that the quality of the code generated by the Mjolner BETA compiler series is actually quite good. Since BETA is so much more powerful than most other languages (including all the major object-oriented ones), it is hard to come up with a benchmark which does full justice to the language by taking more than an unrealistically small subset of the expression mechanisms available into account. (I believe this is true for virtually any pair of object- oriented languages. This is probably one of the main reasons why there doesn't seem to be any generally agreeed-upon set of OO benchmarks.) That being said, it is my experience that for the imperative parts of the language, the efficiency of the Mjolner BETA code is roughly equivalent to that of unoptimized C/C++. This is not too surprising since the BETA compiler does generate native assembler code for all platforms, but does not yet perform advanced register allocation, liveliness analysis, or peephole optimizations. The efficiency will continue to improve as such techniques are adopted. I believe that the next release of the Mjolner BETA compiler will contain significant speed enhancements, as have the previous releases. Meanwhile, remember that BETA contains an easy-to-use interface to C, so that you can code your 5% time-critical loops in regular low-level fashion and continue to enjoy the expressiveness and elegance of the BETA language and its libraries for the remaining 95%. /Jacob Seligmann ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Systematic Software Engineering A/S Phone: 86 15 18 66 Frichsparken Direct: 86 15 18 22 - 116 Soeren Frichs Vej 42 K Fax: 86 15 19 66 DK-8230 Aabyhoej, Denmark E-mail: jas@systematic.dk ------------------------------------------------------------------------