[mercury-users] Native garbage collector for Mercury

[Andrew Bromage]

G'day all.

Ralph Becket wrote:

> > 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.

I must say, though, my personal experience working on diff (you'll find
it in samples/diff in your Mercury distribution, but bear in mind your
version is probably a year old; I hope to put a whole swag of new
features in the next release) suggests that Mercury as it exists is an
excellent language for writing the _environment_ for an OS, even if it's
not yet suitable for writing a kernel/device drivers/etc.  Add CORBA
support to this, and it's a very small leap from there to envisaging
some OS being distributed where the majority of the released code is
written in Mercury.  Sort of like the GNU part of GNU/Linux.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage