[mercury-users] Mercury on Mingw32 or Linux

[Tyson Dowd]

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

The actual generated binaries would be fine.  The problem is with the
build environment, which is heavily geared towards UNIX.

The main problem is that creating processes under UNIX is very cheap and
efficient, so you tend to use them all the time (I believe benchmarking
revealed that it is cheap to create a process in Linux as it is to
create a thread in Windows).

Under Win95/WinNT, creating processes is slow, so you pay a big cost
for all the process creation that "mmake" does. 

That said, people are successfully using Windows as a development
platform, it just takes a little while to get the initial build
environment set up.  If you are compiling programs a lot smaller than
the compiler (and most of the time people are, except the *first* time ;-) 
you can expect the build to be a bit quicker (less modules to compile
means less process creation).

> 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.

The build environment will almost certainly be faster.  The programs
you generate will run at much the same speed.

Mercury 0.7.3 is included in Debian GNU/Linux 2.0, which is going to
be released in 1 hour (www.debian.org).  It should compile almost out of
the box for other Linux platforms too.

-- 
       Tyson Dowd           # "Bill Gates is a white persian cat and a monocle
                            # away from becoming another James Bond villan."
     trd at cs.mu.oz.au        # "No Mr Bond, I expect you to upgrade."
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~trd #                -- Dennis Miller and Terri Branch