[mercury-users] Arguments against Mercury usage??

[Peter Ross]

Hi Nick,

I work for a commercial company.  We have two projects in production
which use Mercury to implement the core business logic.  So Mercury is
certainly ready for production use.

The actual reason why Mercury is not at version 1.0 is that the
compiler doesn't fully implement the reference manual, in particular
it doesn't support partially instantiated modes and uniqueness fully.
Neither of these have been crucial to developing applications.

There are two main problems with using Mercury, that we have encountered.

Problem one you have already alluded to in your email, when you
mentioned rolling your own socket library.  This is an issue in using
Mercury.  You have to roll your own interfaces to each library that
you want to use.  We here at MC are planning to release all the
libraries we use to develop applications to avoid other people redoing
the same work, as this is time-consuming and boring work.

Problem two is that the parallel version of Mercury is significantly
slower than the single threaded version.  This is an issue when
building server applications, which must handle many simultaneous
requests, however it is possible to use a forking server instead.

If you have any other queries or would like to meet in person with
someone from MC, feel free to get in touch.  We have offices in
Belgium and Australia.

Regards,
Peter
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