[mercury-users] Mercury on Mingw32 or Linux

[Fergus Henderson]

On 23-Jul-1998, Joseph M. Dusio <dusioj at norand.com> wrote:
> Thanks to both  Fergus Henderson and Dominique de Waleffe for the 
> quick replies to my questions.  Based upon the responses, I'm gathering
> that CYGWIN Beta-19 is not the platform to use.
> 
> 	Yesterday I was made aware of MingW32.  Is that a feasible
> platform to put between Win95 and Mercury?

Yes.  However, I suspect there are a number of dependencies on the
Mercury runtime and standard library source code on various POSIX features
that are not supported by Win95 + mingw32.  Porting Mercury to mingw32
would thus require some work. This would certainly be a worthwhile exercise,
though.

> If not, how, if at all can Mercury be reasonably executed on Win95?

Well, the current port using gnu-win32 is usable, even if it is less
than ideal.

> I am also curious to learn if I should expect a significant performance
> increase for Mercury by running the same intel platform (P5-90Mhz, 32M
> Ram) with Linux.

That depends on what you mean.  Performance of `mmake', the Mercury make
program, is certainly much better on Linux than on cygwin32.  And the
compiler is probably a little faster (due to more efficient file I/O).
But the speed of the generated code is much the same.

-- 
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.