[mercury-users] Recommended Intel Platform

[Fergus Henderson]

On 22-Jul-1998, Joseph M. Dusio <dusioj at norand.com> wrote:
> I've only just learned of the Mercury project, and am excited to try
> it out.  I've downloaded the Cygnus CYGWIN-32 environment and the
> source for Mercury.  Building Mercury seems to take quite a bit of
> time.  In general, the CYGWIN environment seems quite slow, so my
> compilations are moving slowly.

Yes, the current Windows port of Mercury is not as good as it
could be.

One thing that helps a lot is to set

	RM_C=:

in your Mmakefile (or, if you're building the compiler itself,
in the Mmake.params file).  This tells Mmake not to remove the
`.c' files.  Setting this means that you need a bit more disk
space, but without this, Mmake needs to do some recursive
invocations of GNU Make which are very costly in this
environment.

Another thing that would help would be porting Mercury to mingw32
rather than gnu-win32.  gnu-win32 adds quite a bit of overhead
to the various file system operations, which slows things down
a bit.

Another thing that would help would be modifying GNU Make to have
better support for datestamp files.  With the current version of
GNU Make, Mmake's use of datestamp files to prevent unnecessary
recompilation results in many invocations of do-nothing processes
(`sh -c :') that just exit.  On Unix systems, this is hardly noticable,
but on gnu-win32 and probably on Windows in general, process startup
has a quite significant overhead.

> When Mercury is used on an Intel/Windows-95 computer what is the
> typical or recommended configuration of
> 
> 1) processor type and speed

The faster, the better ;-)

> 2) RAM

For building the Mercury compiler from the source distribution,
I'd recommend 64M, although you can probably do it with 32M and a bit of swap.

If you just want to install the binary distribution and compile
moderate sized Mercury programs, then 32M should be fine.

I did the original port of Mercury to Windows on a Pentium
(133 MHz, I think -- 66 bogomips for Linux fans ;-) with 64M.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.