Algol vs Fortran was RE: VHDL vs Verilog

[Josh Dersch]

Dave McGuire wrote:
> On Feb 9, 2010, at 4:10 AM, Josh Dersch wrote:
>>>> That's certainly an issue.  I wonder how many applications are 
>>>> slower and more overweight due to their being crafted with OOP than 
>>>> they would be if they were coded using more traditional methods.
>>>
>>>   "More traditional methods"?  Just "the way processors execute 
>>> code" would be a good start.  Processors aren't object-oriented in 
>>> nature.  This is one of the reasons why we have computers with 
>>> multi-GHz processors that barely get out of their own way.  The 
>>> constructs commonly used in OO programming don't come anywhere close 
>>> to mapping to hardware efficiently.
>>
>> What "commonly used" constructs are these that are so horribly 
>> inefficient that they would make a multi-GHz processor stumble?  (And 
>> in what language(s)?)
>
>   OBJECTS!
>
>   Our processors have registers, ALUs, and memory locations...not 
> objects.  (iAPX432 notwithstanding)  Constructs that don't map to that 
> paradigm are going to be inefficient, to a degree that corresponds to 
> how badly they match the paradigm.  And objects don't map to it at all.
>
That's not answering my question.  What part of implementing OBJECTS! 
are modern compilers for OO-language-du-jour incapable of translating 
efficiently to native machine code?  And why?  And what exactly is the 
performance hit in the cases you're thinking of?

How, precisely, do objects NOT map to registers or memory locations in 
modern OO languages?  Where does the inefficiency come in?  How much 
faster than a Sparc IPX running FVWM would my machine be if my existing 
software had been written in C instead of 
horribly-inefficient-language?  Details, please.

Josh
>           -Dave
>