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From: bevan@cs.man.ac.uk (Stephen J Bevan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.beta
Subject: Re: BETA questions
Date: 05 May 1995 07:29:57 GMT
Organization: Department of Computer Science; University of Manchester
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In-reply-to: nowias00@marvin.informatik.uni-dortmund.de's message of 20 Apr 1995 10:54:53 GMT

In article <3n5eht$m2i@fbi-news.informatik.uni-dortmund.de> nowias00@marvin.informatik.uni-dortmund.de (Mark Nowiasz) writes:

   - The compiler gave out (relatively useless) warnings ("a run-time check
     will be generated here") but stopped at real errors ("...stopped because
     of semantic errors") without any indication where the error occured.

You didn't indicate which version of the compiler you are using.  The
one I have (3.0 I think) appears to generate reasonable error messages
(i.e. something more useful than "... stopped because of semantic errors").


   - BETA-programs are very large (> 250k even for a simple "Hello
     World" program) and REALLY slow (see below)

Under Linux a "Hello World" with no debugging included is around 80K.
Whilst it is larger than I'd like, it is comparable with the size of
similar programs for similar languages, and this overhead gets lost in
a non-trivial program.


   >How fast is BETA (executable speed)...compared to Eiffel and C++?

   IMHO very slow... i'll show you one example:

   I've had to program a pattern in BETA which would compute recursively the
   numbers of Fibonacci's algorithm. ...

Whilst the speed of Fibonacci is a simple measure of procedure call
overhead it is not usually possible to extrapolate the performance of
most non-trivial programs based on this.  Do you have any other benchmarks?