[m-dev.] Remove managed C++ support from Mercury

[Fergus Henderson]

On 06-Oct-2003, Peter Ross <pro at missioncriticalit.com> wrote:
> I've just tried to use the .NET grades with v1.1 of the framework and it
> no longer compiles anymore and every error that I have gotten so far is
> due to the Managed C++ stuff.
>
> I suggest that we start to phase out the support for MC++ directly in
> Mercury as it has always been the most brittle part of the .NET
> implementation.

I'm not sure that it's fair to describe the MC++ support as "brittle".
Are the problems that you are encountering due to bugs in the Mercury
compiler's MC++ support, bugs in MC++ itself, changes in MC++,
or merely due to changes in the .NET Framework library that this MC++
code is using?

If, as I suspect, it is the last of these, then it would be wrong to
describe the problem as being due to the "brittleness" of the MC++ support.

> As a start, I will attempt to remove all the managed C++ dependencies
> inside the Mercury compiler.
> 
> This would also improve the situation in that this would also move us
> one step closer to porting the Mercury compiler to work with mono, where
> there is only a C# compiler available.

I would be very happy to convert all of the code in the Mercury standard
library which uses MC++ foreign code to instead use C# foreign code.
However, I would be very unhappy to drop the support for MC++ foreign
code in the Mercury compiler.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne         |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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