[m-users.] Mercury on ARM

[Julien Fischer]

Hi,

On Mon, 3 Jun 2013, Tycho Luyben wrote:

> Hi,  Is it possible to get Mercury working on ARM? I cannot find any
> references to it, except from 2005 which is outdated.

It was certainly possible then.  I haven't heard anything since, but
in principle, it should still be possible.

> It seems because of the C generation, it should be capable of
> compiling the compiler to ARM from an Intel machine using a cross
> compiler? And then (if needed) bootstrap with that? Any issues with
> that ? Did anyone do that?

The C code generated by the Mercury compiler's high-level C backend
(which is what the pre-generated .c files in the source distribution
use) is pure C (i.e.  it doesn't use any GNU extensions), so that should
definitely work.  (It appears that in the asm_fast grades -- the fastest
of the low-level C grades -- also worked.  And shared libraries as
well.)

Setting up Mercury as a cross-compiler is a little bit tricky; it's been
done before for cross-compiling Windows executables using the MinGW GCC
on Linux.  The file README.MinGW-cross describes the details.  I guess
that something similar would work for ARM.

Cheers,
Julien.