[mercury-users] Native garbage collector for Mercury

[Randall Helzerman]

> 
> There is also the point that Unix and Windogs are *not* real-time
> systems of any kind.  What is the target platform?
> 

Here is the "grand plan".  Why is C++ so popular today?  Backward
compatibility with C.  

But why is C so popular?  There are dozens of other languages, then and now,
which would take the crown.

I would maintain that C is popular for one reason only: UNIX was written
in it.  Once you own the operating system, you own the world--just as
Bill Gates found out.

Logic programming in general, and Mercury in particular, are not going to
become mainstream languages until it is shown that they can be used to
create an operating system.

Today, the importance of multimedia means that any new operating system
must be hard real time.

I see a definate eco-logic-al niche for a hard real time operating system
written in Mercury, both for embeded systems (a lot of good work in
robotics is being pursued in the logic programming tradition, e.g.
Shanahan, Pool, Macworth, Goebel) and for desktops and servers.

I'm sure you can think of many advantages for such an operating system, but
let me just point out one: distributed computing/RPC.  Suppose you wish to
provide some service to the internet--say renting out your spare CPU cycles,
so you accept remote proceedure calls.  But you don't want to let a
malicious program run, nor one which will loop infinitely.  By using
abstract evaluation and Mercury's termination analysis, you could screen out
undesirable potential incomming compute requests.  Moreover, once the
operating system is written in a pure logical programming language, we
could begin to think about things like _formally_proving_ that the OS
is secure.