Re: [DotGNU]Mercury on Portable.NET (not successful)

[Fergus Henderson]

On 27-Feb-2003, Rhys Weatherley <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Actually I didn't really expect this to run, since I was trying it on
> > Linux, and some of those DLLs eventually reference Microsoft.VisualC
> > which is not going to be present.
> 
> We do actually have a Microsoft.VisualC now.  There isn't very much in it.

OK, that sounds good.  It would be great if this code could run on
Linux too.  We don't really use Microsoft.VisualC much. I think it is
used just for the DebugInfoInPDB attribute, which gets inserted because
we compile with /debug.

Actually there is one place in the Mercury standard library
and runtime system where we do need to use native code: for the
"set_environment_variable" procedure, we need to invoke the C/Posix
putenv() API, since there's no way to do it using the .NET Framework
API.  But I've looked at the code which MSVC++ generates for that, and
it looks like ordinary pinvoke code which in theory ought to work on
Linux too.  It does reference a couple of attributes in Microsoft.VisualC
("NoSignSpecifier" and "IsConstModifier" on the `int8 *' / `const char *'
argument), but they are probably trivial to define if you haven't already
done so.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <address@hidden>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne         |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.