Ada Outperforms Assembly: A Case Study

https://www2.seas.gwu.edu/~adagroup/sigada-website/lawlis.html

by todsacerdoti • 3 years ago

58 43 3 years ago

www2.seas.gwu.edu

smitty1e• 3 years ago

With the exception of the 1996 update note below, this article is reprinted from the Proceedings of TRI-Ada '92, Orlando, FL, November 16-20, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York, 1992.

necroforest• 3 years ago

Does anyone use Ada in 2023? Back in college (~2008), I had a prof who was obsessed with it but AFAIK almost nobody used it even back them.

Rebelgecko• 3 years ago

I think it's still somewhat common in defense and safety of life type applications, and not much outside of those niches

Jtsummers3• 3 years ago

Aerospace, defense, and safety critical systems still use it. It's less common these days but still out there. Ada 2012 is pretty nice if you're going to be writing imperative/procedural code anyways.

windexh8er• 3 years ago

I worked for a defensive contractor in the early 2000s. We had MS2 and ATC programs in our facility. Anything that had to do with the operations of ATC was written in ADA. Almost all the guys I worked with went to school at Embry Riddle. Pretty sure those systems are still written in ADA.

frankreyes2• 3 years ago

It's less common these days

Was Ada replaced by something else? What do they use?

kokorozasu3• 3 years ago

I graduated recently and my first project out of college was in Ada. It was defense-related. I have also heard rumors of banks still having some ada code.

My impression of the language is that it is a lot close to C than other languages like Java or Rust.

ttoinou2• 3 years ago

In France I did learn Ada at computer science school. Maybe because it is useful for the aerospace and aviation industry ? Or because teachers were used to it and deemed it was great to learn programming in a rigorous manner.

I have to say at least when you're coding in Ada there is no ideological fights over functional programming or silly design patterns from OOP. Refreshing.

kokorozasu3• 3 years ago

The ideological fight that occurred at my job where the project was in Ada was that the most senior programmer didn't want to use git.

thesuperbigfrog• 3 years ago

> Does anyone use Ada in 2023?

https://www.adacore.com/industries

Ada is used for situations where the code has to work or people die.

That makes it niche compared to other programming languages where it is okay to "panic" or "fail fast".

Different tools for different needs.

musicale4• 3 years ago

Ada is used for situations where the code has to work or people die.

C/C++/Java/JavaScript/Python/etc. are used in situations where code doesn't have to be reliable, secure, or correct.

If customers actually cared about any of those things then our favorite tech companies wouldn't be worth zillions of dollars.

SnorkelTan• 3 years ago

My understanding is it's used in embedded and real-time systems domains. It came out of the DoD apparently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)

asddubs• 3 years ago

The GHDL compiler/simulator is written in ada. I suppose this makes sense since VHDL shares a lot of syntax with Ada

stock_toaster• 3 years ago

Apparently NVDIA does - https://devclass.com/2022/11/08/spark-as-good-as-rust-for-sa...

FpUser3• 3 years ago

The same question can be asked about many languages that are very actively used. Just not by web army.

From my personal experience - I use many languages and I mostly base my choice on perceived ROI for particular project / situation. I could not give a flying fuck if "anyone still uses those in 2023" .

yjftsjthsd-h• 3 years ago

ROI is substantially influenced by the ecosystem; the more libraries and documentation are published, the better the ROI.

evertedsphere• 3 years ago

I work for a bank in Europe, and we have a large Ada project that does a lot of number crunching and is extensively depended on.

pjmlp2• 3 years ago

Enough to keep 7 commercial vendors in business.

https://www.adacore.com/

https://www.ghs.com/products/ada_optimizing_compilers.html

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/apexada

https://www.ddci.com/products_score/

http://www.irvine.com/tech.html

http://www.ocsystems.com/w/index.php/OCS:PowerAda

http://www.rrsoftware.com/html/prodinf/janus95/j-ada95.htm

ajdude• 3 years ago

The latest version of the Ada standard came out in 2022. It has its own package manager similar to Cargo and I'm actively working in Ada. Favorite language.

pornel• 3 years ago

Nowadays CPU pipelining is the norm, so all serious optimizers have to do instruction scheduling. Beating naive assembly written for one instruction after another, is not novel any more.

ttoinou2• 3 years ago

Can you write pipelines asm / schedule instructions with custom asm code ?

monocasa• 3 years ago

With the right feedback cycle with the appropriate debug counters, absolutely.

okanat• 3 years ago

Somebody has to come up with the intended results of the optimization for certain chips and the actual benchmarks in the first place. So they do write assembly and test various things.

However, that person probably have extensive experience in that narrow set of problems. Most programmers don't.

jleahy• 3 years ago

There are still jobs where you end up writing large amounts of asm regularly and this is absolutely table-stakes for that. Otherwise there would be no point using asm at all, you’d just use C or another high-level language.

There was once a case where someone dropped from asm to machine code to shave a little more performance off. Sometimes asm is too high-level.

olliej• 3 years ago

I feel like disabling all the error checking is a significant change for comparing performance, because the phrasing implies removal of bounds checks, etc that can be significant.

That aside a 2x performance improvement speaks to something algorithmic rather than the canonical "sufficiently intelligent compiler" - does anyone have the before/after source for this "study" (Obviously it does matter that algorithmic improvements may be easier in a higher level language, but that is likely truer for any high level language vs assembly)

compsciphd• 3 years ago

(1992)

yakubin• 3 years ago

Needs a (1992) — time of original publication — or (1996) — time of last update.

Ada Outperforms Assembly: A Case Study

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