[mercury-users] Native garbage collector for Mercury

[Ralph Becket]

Randall Helzerman wrote on 10 Sep:
> > 	
> > 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: 
> [...]

These people are not saying it's dead, but that it's inappropriate for
certain tasks.

This will certainly not stop the Java juggernaut from trying anyway.

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

You said it: `research'.  Research is not mainstream.  And the Fifth
Generation project did not constitute Japan's *entire* CS research
effort at the time.

> 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++).

Look, it doesn't matter what the OS is written in as long as you can
link to the appropriate system libraries in a hassle free way.

I think C's success stemmed from a combination of the speed of the
compiled code and the fact that the language does not require that the
programmer grasp any tricky or subtle computer science.  Much as it
pains me to say it, I doubt that Mercury will ever be real mainstream
because of this: the majority of programmers simply will not grok the
benefits of logical variables, backtracking control flow, higher order
programming etc etc etc.

> > (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.

No it isn't.  Microsoft adopted VB as their *application level*
scripting language.  It has nothing to do with the OS.

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

A good deal of OS code is very low-level.  It needs to be small and
tight.  Conventional wisdom has it that a language with a close
relationship to the bare metal is a good thing to use here.  Mercury
(bar its C interface) is not like this.

Ralph

-- 
Ralph Becket  |  rwab1 at cam.sri.com  |  http://www.cam.sri.com/people/becket.html