[m-dev.] Proposed installation profiles

[Julien Fischer]

Hi,

On Fri, 23 Oct 2015, Dirk Ziegemeyer wrote:

>> Am 23.10.2015 um 08:10 schrieb Matthias Güdemann <matthias at guedemann.org>:
>>
>> My hypothesis is that this simplification is mainly to provide less
>> surprise to new users. Therefore, I think that a *default* should
>> include the declarative debugger grade and support for
>> parallelism. These are prominent features of Mercury, at least, these
>> are the features I tell people about.
>
>
> Are the parallel grades the only option to use more than one processor
> with a mercury program?

For the C backends, yes.  For the non-C backends, a separate .par
component is not necessary.

> Are these parallel grades stable already?

For the high-level C backend (moduluo the need to replace the use of
unnamed semaphores on OS X with something that works), yes.

> If yes, why don’t you just include the parallel grades instead of the
> non-parallel grades in a basic/minimal installation?

The parallel grades being available is dependent on a POSIX threads
library being available -- while that is pretty much always the case on
Linux, it requires more work on other systems, for example Windows using
MSVC as the C compiler.  Since the inclusion of .par grades is
conditional on the presence of pthreads, the non .par versions are still
the default.

Julien.