[mercury-users] Native garbage collector for Mercury

[Randall Helzerman]

> 	> 	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.
> 	> 	
> 	> Just how many operating systems are written in COBOL?  Or BASIC?  Or Perl?
> 	> How many *available* operating systems are written in Java?
> 	
> 	These are all dying programming languages, with the notable
> 	exception of perl.
> 	
> Their present status is totally irrelevant,
> although it's news to me that Java is dying.
> On which planet is that true?

Well, this is what some of the talking heads of Sol 3 are saying: 

        Mark Andressen says "If you write your apps in Java, you get
                             less features and more instability".

        Linus Torevalds says "Java on the desktop is dead.  And once
                              you're dead on the desktop, your dead."

        Mark L. Van Name & Bill Catchings 
            "A second wave of hype advanced the notion of Java as
             the right way to build back-end server applications.
             We're skeptical that Java will succeed in this area
             because server applications tend to have to scale well,
             and interpretive languages such as Java must grapple
             with inherent performance issues."


> The point is that they *became* very popular, that they became
> *mainstream*, without ever having an operating system written in them.

Actually, logic programing itself was once mainstream: it dominated the
entire computer research agenda of an entire country (japan).  What counts
is staying power.

While these guys were rising and falling, C was just getting bigger and
bigger.  Why?  Because in addition to unix, one by one every desktop OS
started to be written in C (and later, C++).

> I could add the XBASE family of languages,

Yeah, same for Lotus 123 with its scripting language--and they suffered the
same fate.  When the OS shifted out from under them, they fell like a
house of cards on a 3-legged table.

> (which, I need hardly remind you, means Visual *Basic* for Applications).

....which is yet another programming language which is tied to the agenda
of an operating system.

> The point is simply that a language doesn't have to be a SIL in order
> to become `mainstream'.  It has to be very useful for *something*, but
> that `thing' doesn't have to be OS implementation.

True enough.  But most workaday programmers are of the "show me" mentality,
and I still contend that the most vivid (and historically successful) way of
proving that a programming language is good at something is to write an
operating system in it.

Moreover, what does Mercury lack besides real-time garbage collection to
serve as the ultimate SIL?