[m-dev.] Mercury and MinGW64

[Julien Fischer]

Hi,

Over the past few weeks I have been working on porting Mercury to use
the MinGW64
compiler (i.e. so we can generate 64-bit code on Windows).
The version of the compiler in the latest ROTD** (rotd-2013-04-05) now
bootchecks
in the both asm_fast.gc and hlc.gc grades (and indeed also in the hlc.gc.trseg).
(The test suite unfortunately does not run, due to unrelated existing
problems with
the MSYS shell -- I am looking into fixing these.)

I will update the documentation in the next couple of days.  In the meantime, if
anyone wants to try it, the build instructions are pretty much
identical to normal
MinGW except that you must invoke configure with the following option:

     --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32

You will need the MinGW64 toolchain in your PATH.  I did all my
MinGW64 builds under
MSYS; they should work under Cygwin as well, but I haven't tried that.
(I believe that there is a Cygwin package available for MinGW64.)

AFAIK, the .par grades do *not* currently work, although I am
currently experimenting
with the 64-bit version of the pthreads-win32 library to see if I can
make them work.

Cheers,
Julien.

** the ROTDs I have been building are currently hosted by Opturion, at
<http://www.opturion.com/mercury/>.