[mercury-users] Usage of global register variables on ix86

[Andrew Bromage]

G'day all.

Marko Schuetz wrote:

> Compiling 0.7.3 using FreeBSD 2.2.7 on a ix86 machine there was an
> error compiling label.c. This is due to stdio.h being included before
> regs.h and in stdio.h there is an inline function for
> __sputc. Including regs.h before stdio.h solves the problem. I did not
> think of this obvious solution and instead first posted to the
> freebsd-stable mailing list.

As I just explained on freebsd-stable, this problem (plus another which
was causing problems compiling under FreeBSD 2.2.x) has been fixed in
the development version for a couple of months.  If you're impatient,
you can download the latest release of the day (instructions on the
Mercury web site), or you can wait until Mercury 0.8 is released.

I do plan to make a FreeBSD package for Mercury some time early next
year, since FreeBSD seems to be the second most popular Unix-esque OS
for the x86 architecture.

As for the questions on timings, we haven't done any under FreeBSD yet,
since nobody has an unloaded machine to test it on (the FreeBSD machine
that I use doubles as a web proxy), but I'm sure one of the others can
provide some details on other x86 platforms.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage