Bug#538802: ITP: mercury -- The Mercury programming system, a pure logical/functional programming language.
Paul Bone <pbone@csse.unimelb.edu.au> writes:
> This is mostly correct. Mercury is indeed self-hosting and was
> previously included in Debian. Mercury has a number of different
> backends two of these target C, high-level C and low-level C. The
> Mercury source distribution includes C intermediate files for the
> standard library and compiler generated by the low-level C backend,
> these can be compiled with GCC to generate binaries which can be used to
> bootstrap an installation by re-compiling the Mercury sources.
>
> I have a working Debian package that builds and bootstraps Mercury from
> the source distribution. It requires gcc-3.4 as a build-depend and is
> able to bootstrap itself so that the resulting binaries are optimal on
> 32bit and 64bit machines (the explanation involves a discussion of
> tagged pointers).
>
> I hope that this will be acceptable by the Debian project and that
> distributing intermediate files in the .orig.tar.gz file is not a
> problem.
The same applies to the package aspectc++, a package that I maintain
since some time. AspectC++ is a language extension for C++ for aspect
oriented programming (AOP). It is built on top of an C/C++ Parsing and
Manipulation framework (PUMA), where some functionality (e.g. support
for various GNU language extension) is implemented using AspectC++
aspects. There you have a pretty similar situation, and I'm doing a very
similar approach: Shipping intermediate files that can be processed with
gcc.
I suggest that you use these intermediate files only for compiling an
intermediate compiler for bootstrapping. With that compiler, redo all
intermediate files and build the binaries of the compiler that will
eventually end up in the package. This ensures that you'll end with a
working compiler on all architectures.
BTW, this approach was actually suggested to me by Lamont Jones a few
years ago. It seems to be a quite common approach, FWIW.
--
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4
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