[m-users.] deleting the Erlang backend (Peter Wang)

[M McDonough]

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 18:01:46 +1100 "Peter Wang" <novalazy at gmail.com>:
> The Erlang backend has been deprecated as of the Mercury 20.01 release.
> If anyone happens to be using the Erlang backend, please let us know
> before we commit to deleting it for good.

I used it on NetBSD on a Raspberry Pie for a while, about two years
ago. It was noticeably more efficient than using the C grades on my
Raspberry Pi 1B interestingly, although it's possible that's in part
because the only low-level C grade that worked with that system was
jump or none. As a side note, I've generally found that, on BSD
systems outside x86/amd64 still using gcc, jump and none are the only
low-level C grades that work.

I didn't actually use it for anything serious, since I would have had
to write a lot of Erlang code to supplement the existing C and Java
backend code that that project used, and I instead decided to try to
optimize the C components.

I tried to build with it again early this year, however I couldn't
even seem to setup a basic Erlang environment on the Linux machine I
was using then. I'm unsure if it builds properly with the modern
Erlang setup.