[m-users.] Writing Prolog extensions in Mercury

[Haitao Zhang]

Hi,

I am interested in using Mercury to write Prolog extensions. The first
question that comes to mind is the GC issue, as Prolog (SWI in my case) has
its own GC. I appreciate any thought on how important this is and if there
are other potential problems.

Background: I've read the previous threads discussing why there is no REPL
support for Mercury and I largely agree with the view that it is not
necessary for debugging purposes. However there is another modality where
REPL is of great help which is the case of exploratory programming. In this
case one may deal with complicated data that takes effort to be processed
into a form that is amenable to manipulation and the programmer needs to
interact with the data to decide what is the best way to proceed. I've
found Prolog REPL to be indispensable for this purpose, however I would
like to have better performance as the data set scales up. Writing Prolog
extensions in C for performance enhancement though is quite painful because
of the gap in semantics. I am interested in finding out if Mercury may be a
better tool for this task.

Thanks,

Haitao
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