Rob Malpass said:
> Fred said that one reason he liked Forth was that it was
> fast - which got me thinking....
> Nowadays would we refer to one language being any faster than another? I
> guess we can exclude from this debate the speed of compilation. I'd
> guess for most (non-climate-modelling) applications - compilation speed on
> modern hardware isn't much of an overhead.
If you are compiling a program of one million LOC, you'll find
that compilation speed affects the way you work. We spent a lot
of time improving compilation speed of our Forth compilers for a
client to get a full build down to below 20 seconds.
> So once a program is compiled - is any language faster than any other
> nowadays? Two programs: one in C, one in Java doing the identical job -
> is there anything anywhere that says one will always be faster for
> non-trivial applications?
There's nothing that makes a program in one language execute any
faster than one in another language other than the quality of
the implementation of the compiler. That in turn assumes that
performance is the primary objective. Outside the fat desktop
world, code density may be more important.
Stephen
--
Stephen Pelc, stephen@???
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441, fax: +44 (0)23 8033 9691
web:
http://www.mpeforth.com - free VFX Forth downloads
