[mercury-users] status of .NET support

[Peter Ross]

Hi Wendelin,

.NET development is still alive and well.  Currently I am being employed
by Mission Critical (www.missioncriticalit.com) to allow Mercury to be
used for commercial development on the .NET platform.  This involves
getting the compiler to generate valid IL (done modulo bugs), improve
its performance and improve interoperability between Mercury and other
framework languages.

I am currently working on improving the interoperability between Mercury
and other framework languages.  This main thrust of this development is
to use the high-level data representation of Mercury types.  This should
allow Mercury data structures to be more easily used from other .NET
languages.  The work is progressing but slowly at the moment due to
other constraints on my time.

In answer to you questions.
.NET support is not sleeping.
The compiler has always just generated IL (no native code), however the
code is not currently verifiable (for performance reasons).
Nearly all of the library has been ported (about 95% I would think).
A tool has been written which generates a Mercury interface to .NET
classes, by mapping them onto a type-class hierarchy.  The tool is still
under active development and the best representation for an OO hierarchy
in Mercury has not been fully decided yet.  However this tool has been
used in a product to use the .NET XML parser, so it works.  If you wish
for more information, about how to use it then I would be happy to help.

I hope that answers your questions, and feel free to get in contact with
me for any other questions.

Regards,
Peter

----- Original Message -----
From: "Wendelin Reich" <wreich at gmx.net>
To: <mercury-users at cs.mu.OZ.AU>
Sent: Monday, September 02, 2002 11:47 PM
Subject: [mercury-users] status of .NET support


> Dear All,
>
> I fear that I am about to ask a pretty frequent question, but scanning
> through the archives of the Mercury mailing lists, reading
> README.DotNet, the documentation and related files, I still wonder
what
> has happened to .NET support in Mercury. The page under
> http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/research/mercury/dotnet.html is obviously from
> last year, although the information it gives might still be
up-to-date.
> But all this happened like 14-16 months ago, and .NET is already about
> to become a huge success, I think. Did Mercury's .NET-support make any
> significant progress since then?
>
> Having read the Mercury tutorial and transition guide, I feel like
> Mercury is what Prolog always should have been, but before I commit
> myself to this beautiful language I got to know how well it will
> integrate on new platforms. Could anyone be so kind and point me and
the
> list to information as to the status of .NET? Is .NET-support
sleeping?
> Is the compiler now fully IL-compatible? And most of all: is the
> "partial port of the Mercury library" (so written under the above
link)
> now complete? Will there be any information regarding how to *use*
> .NET-classes in Mercury? According to Microsoft's own
> supported-language-list, Mercury is the only declarative
.NET-language,
> so I really really hope that .NET-support is not being discontinued.
>
> Thank you very much for any hints from an aspiring Mercury-user,
> Wendelin Reich, Uppsala University, Sweden
>
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