Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!dogie!uwvax!astroatc!nicmad!lalonde
From: lalonde@nicmad.UUCP (John Lalonde)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel
Subject: Re: Eiffel Performance
Keywords: eiffel
Message-ID: <3734@nicmad.UUCP>
Date: 25 Feb 89 15:38:14 GMT
References: <383@Portia.Stanford.EDU> <126@aostra.UUCP>
Reply-To: lalonde@nicmad.UUCP (John Lalonde)
Organization: Nicolet Instrument Corp.  Madison, WI
Lines: 35

In article <126@aostra.UUCP> stanford@aostra.UUCP (curtis stanford) writes:
>
>I've had Eiffel 2.1b for a couple of months and plan on doing
>a major graphics package with it.  I'd also like to see our department
>switch to Eiffel for our new software development.  After the initial
>investment in getting the basic libraries you need, the time savings is
>incredible!!  It's a well thought out language.  I only wish it ran a bit
>faster ;-) 

We are seriously considering using Eiffel for a new product. However, we 
have no idea what the current performance of the language is. Can anyone
post some information regarding their experiences? I realize that Eiffel
is dependent (to a degree) oh the host system's tools but I think that
it would be helpful to many if some real-life examples were given. It 
would be most helpful if examples were based on the current release of
Eiffel (2.1 ?).

I know that it is hard to compare Eiffel performance to languages that
do not have object-oriented facilities but it necessary because that is
where people are coming from when they consider migrating to a new
language technology. So, can any kind of comparison be made between 
Eiffel and a good C compiler? 

In comparing Eiffel to other languages with object-oriented facilities
how would Eiffel even compare to C++ or g++ with respect to performance?

Finally, can someone describe how Eiffel method invocation works. Is it
based on message passing like Smalltalk and Objective-C or are methods
invoked via procedure calls like C++ ?

Thanks for any information...
-- 
John LaLonde
Nicolet Instrument Corporation
uucp: {ucbvax,rutgers,harvard}!uwvax!astroatc!nicmad!lalonde