3 ms·

Pascal's compilation time is still unparalleled in its speed and that is one of its greatest features.

by davikr 2y ago

PaulHoule 2y ago
True for Turbo. Not true for the truly atrocious UCSD Pascal. Computer scientists circa 1980 were driven absolutely crazy by BASIC becoming the dominant teaching language in primary schools; with alternatives like UCSD Pascal, however, you are better off writing assembly.
- romwell 2y ago
  Pascal = Turbo Pascal if we're taking late 80s/early 90s. Everything else is blasphemy. After that, Pascal = Delphi (for quite a while). The fact that both are commercial, closed-source (and, in case of Delphi, quite pricey) packages is pretty much the sole reason Pascal lost out in popularity to languages that mere mortals could use at home without having to resort to piracy. It took Embarcadero over a decade to realize that offering a free "Community Edition" of the IDE is a must to stay relevant. It was too late by then.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    Some people in the 1990s thought that open source, particularly the GNU suite, killed off the market for “cheap and cheerful” dev tools, thus we haven’t had a Borland ever since. Today innovation in programming tools tends to come from the hugest companies (Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Facebook) and even successful open source tools such as the LLVM-based compiler suite owe a lot to big funders like Apple. (Possibly Jetbrains is an exception, though my take is their attempts to introduce new languages like Katlin and radical frameworks like MPS haven’t been as impactful as getting the bugs and slowness out of Eclipse)
peutetre 2y ago
Go compiles fast: https://blog.howardjohn.info/posts/go-build-times/ https://blog.howardjohn.info/posts/go-build-times/
- anothername12 2y ago
  34000 lines of code/min on an 8088 fast?
082349872349872 2y ago
Much of that (potential) compilation speed is due to Wirth's personality, but his circumstances also helped. For industrial languages, programs will be compiled a few times while developing and debugging, and then run many, many more times in production. For a teaching language, programs will be compiled more than a few times while learning and debugging, and then run never. This situation has the corollary that teaching languages ought almost always to opt in favour of compilation speed over speed of compiled code. (when I started programming, developers shared a minicomputer CPU, which meant that even with Unix, which prioritises editor threads over compiler threads, ends of quarters were brutal for load average and hence system responsiveness)
- romwell 2y ago
  You say this as if fast compilation speed somehow means bad performance. This is a false dichotomy. Pascal compiles fast and runs fast. Then there's the fact that performance of a program depends on far more things than the language it's written in — and faster iteration cycles ease optimization and profiling on the level of algorithms, which is where you have most gains. Squeezing that potential 3% speed up from using another language is rarely worth it then.

Pascal's compilation time is still unparalleled in its speed and that is one of its greatest features.

by davikr 2y ago

Pascal's compilation time is still unparalleled in its speed and that is one of its greatest features.

True for Turbo. Not true for the truly atrocious UCSD Pascal. Computer scientists circa 1980 were driven absolutely crazy by BASIC becoming the dominant teaching language in primary schools; with alternatives like UCSD Pascal, however, you are better off writing assembly.

romwell 2y ago
Pascal = Turbo Pascal if we're taking late 80s/early 90s. Everything else is blasphemy. After that, Pascal = Delphi (for quite a while). The fact that both are commercial, closed-source (and, in case of Delphi, quite pricey) packages is pretty much the sole reason Pascal lost out in popularity to languages that mere mortals could use at home without having to resort to piracy. It took Embarcadero over a decade to realize that offering a free "Community Edition" of the IDE is a must to stay relevant. It was too late by then.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  Some people in the 1990s thought that open source, particularly the GNU suite, killed off the market for “cheap and cheerful” dev tools, thus we haven’t had a Borland ever since. Today innovation in programming tools tends to come from the hugest companies (Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Facebook) and even successful open source tools such as the LLVM-based compiler suite owe a lot to big funders like Apple. (Possibly Jetbrains is an exception, though my take is their attempts to introduce new languages like Katlin and radical frameworks like MPS haven’t been as impactful as getting the bugs and slowness out of Eclipse)

peutetre 2y ago

Go compiles fast: https://blog.howardjohn.info/posts/go-build-times/ https://blog.howardjohn.info/posts/go-build-times/

anothername12 2y ago
34000 lines of code/min on an 8088 fast?

082349872349872 2y ago

Much of that (potential) compilation speed is due to Wirth's personality, but his circumstances also helped. For industrial languages, programs will be compiled a few times while developing and debugging, and then run many, many more times in production. For a teaching language, programs will be compiled more than a few times while learning and debugging, and then run never. This situation has the corollary that teaching languages ought almost always to opt in favour of compilation speed over speed of compiled code. (when I started programming, developers shared a minicomputer CPU, which meant that even with Unix, which prioritises editor threads over compiler threads, ends of quarters were brutal for load average and hence system responsiveness)

romwell 2y ago
You say this as if fast compilation speed somehow means bad performance. This is a false dichotomy. Pascal compiles fast and runs fast. Then there's the fact that performance of a program depends on far more things than the language it's written in — and faster iteration cycles ease optimization and profiling on the level of algorithms, which is where you have most gains. Squeezing that potential 3% speed up from using another language is rarely worth it then.