[mercury-users] I am not able to compile Mercury 0.13.1

[Julien Fischer]

On Sat, 2 Aug 2008, Eduardo Costa wrote:

> Hi, Julien.
> Can I send a (somewhat) large package to the list?

I think the list has a limit of 100Kb - if it exceeds that just
break it into separate posts.

> There is another issue.
> My main interest is the use of Mercury on Windows. I believe that Windows
> programmers find little support if they want to use Mercury. One must
> understand that people who work with Windows are not used to compile from
> sources; they need binaries.  Besides this, if one works with a Graphical
> User Interface, Mercury requires a dos box to function properly; programs
> compiled without the dos box are not launched.

I don't understand that last bit.  The Mercury compiler requires a 
terminal to use directly but there is no reason it cannot be integrated
into an IDE such as Visual Studio or Eclipse and used from within
that.  It's no different from compilers for most other languages in
that respect.

On Windows Mercury programs will be terminal applications unless they
are written as windowed applications using the Windows API (or whatever
Microsoft are choosing to call it these days.)  The same is true of,
for example, C or C++ programs.

> From previous email exchanges with Fergus, I know that this lack of Windows
> support is due to limited manpower.  I would like to propose the formation
> of a work group to offer binaries for Windows, and add good GUI libraries to
> the (Windows) distribution.  For the time being, I will send one of my
> packages to the list for comments.

I have been looking at the Windows port of Mercury myself as part of the
G12 project recently -- getting regularly built binary packages of
Mercury for Windows would be very useful.

Julien.