Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!burl!codas!pdn!alan
From: alan@pdn.UUCP (Alan Lovejoy)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.modula2
Subject: Re: Modula2 on Encore (questions)
Message-ID: <2270@pdn.UUCP>
Date: 15 Feb 88 23:01:03 GMT
References: <8026@sunybcs.UUCP> <3740001@wdl1.UUCP>
Reply-To: alan@pdn.UUCP (0000-Alan Lovejoy)
Organization: Paradyne Corporation, Largo, Florida
Lines: 22

In article <3740001@wdl1.UUCP> rion@wdl1.UUCP (Rion Cassidy) writes:
>Pete Soper writes:
>
>>Runtime performance is about 1/4 as good as that of equivalent C
>>programs compiled with Encore C, based on the Hennessey/Nye
>>benchmarks.
>
>Is this typical of modula-2?  Is C usually 4 times faster for
>equivalent programs?

The difference between different compilers for the SAME language on the
SAME machine running the SAME operating system can vary by more than a
factor of five.  This makes it very difficult to get objective
measurements of the difference in speed a language makes (assuming 
all the languages being compared use the same execution technology:
all are compiled or all are interpreted).  The parse tree that is
generated by a C compiler and the one generated by a Modula-2 compiler
are extremely similar.  They can pretty much share the same code
generator.  In those systems where they do share the same code
generator, they produce very similar benchmark results.

--alan@pdn