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Erlang written in Hell?

Another thread had this quote

  1. Erlang VM BEAM and HiPE are written mainly in C.
  2. Incoming drivers are written primarily in C. (They are connected to a virtual machine and provides communication with the outside world.)

I read a few opinions about how reliable Ada typing, modularity, run-time checking, parallel processing, etc. better than C.

Will Erlang be compiled using Ada noticeably better or worse than Erlang made using C?

Just a hypothetical Q.

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Usually I would throw a bunch of affectionate words on you on such a topic, but it turns out that this exact question has been studied (this is a .doc file. Sorry).

Rational had a compiler with a large amount of code in both languages ​​and a large amount of data collected over several years by error rate, repair time, etc. Out of curiosity, one of their engineers cracked the numbers.

The answer was "C development costs exceed Ada expenses." If you read the final heading, you will see that they believed that writing the same code in Ada would cost them about half as much as it says in the cost of C.

I know that everyone who reads this is trying to knock holes in this conclusion. So do I. But they looked at darn at every angle that I could think of in the report.

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"Better" how? Better than faster? Better than with smaller errors? Better than the more portable? Better than more readable? Better than more stretchable?

For any suitable definition of “better,” arguments can be made anyway. However, it is only a scripture that a non-compiled language is more portable than C. Thus, if one of your goals is to make your application very portable, C is a great choice.

More people understand C than Ada. Writing erlang extensions can be a lot harder if it were written in Ada, simply because fewer people are familiar with the language.

C code can be highly efficient, but I don't know the comparison between C and Ada w / r with compiler optimization.

An Ada type check may be helpful, or it can be a real problem. It is assumed that the virtual machine performs its own type checking on subject elements. The RTTC overhead at Ada can put a completely unnecessary burden.

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Maybe, but in what language was your Ada compiler written? Hell What about the compiler that your FIRST Ada compiler writes?

At some point, when you create software, formal semantics and software processes are much more important than what language was encoded.

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