[m-dev.] Re: .Net back-end status?

[Peter Ross]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2005 at 05:23:18AM +0100, Ralph Becket wrote:
> I've received an e-mail from a programme manager at Microsoft who wants
> to talk to me about Mercury, specifically with respect to the .Net
> back-end.
> 
> What is the status of the .Net back end?  What's our position if they
> want more work done on it (and are prepared to put up some cash?)
> 
The last time I tested it, it passed most of the tests in the Mercury
test suite.  If you go back through the archives of mdev you can see 
exactly how many tests still failed.  Most of these tests which 
failed were to do with RTTI.  In particular, construct and deconstruct
don't work fully yet.

I haven't tested it lately because we haven't actually managed to find
a client that uses .NET here.  Europe seems to be predominantly J2EE
shops.

Where the .NET backend doesn't work is consuming assemblies from 
different backends in an elegant manner.  I did write a tool which
attempts to automatically give a Mercury interface to a .NET assembly,
it works, but it doesn't feel elegant.

So for me, the two major things that need to be done for the .NET
backend are
	* complete RTTI support (preferably by having the RTTI
	  completely rewritten in Mercury, so that we would get
	  all the RTTI working on all the non-C backends for free)
	* work out how to elegantly integrate with OO languages.

If there was money, I would like to do it.  I really do believe that
for Mercury to be able to move out of the niche market we really need
to support .NET and Java out of the box.  It would certainly make it
easier for MC to sell our solutions.

Pete
-- 
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