We had a meeting of the Mercury group on Fri Dec 01, 3:15pm to 4:15pm.

Attendees:
	David Jeffery 
	Mark Brown 
	Zoltan Somogyi 
	Tyson Dowd 
	Simon Taylor 
	Fergus Henderson 
	David Overton 
	Levi Cameron 
	Ina Cheng 
	Julien Fischer 
	Simon Mei 
	Sam Thurairatnam 
	Adrian Pellas-Rice 

	(Record numbers!)

1.  Progress reports.

	We went around the table, with each person in turn discussing what
	they had been working on recently and/or what they were planning
	to work on.

	Tyson Dowd 

		- has spent a lot of time this week working with the
		  summer students.

		- has been working on getting the IL backend library
		  working.  All the changes have been made, but there
		  are some hitches with `:- external'.  Tyson says he
		  is still on track for a December release of this.
		  The changes will be backported into the release
		  branch after the code freeze.

	Mark Brown :
	
		- has been working on redesigning the search strategy
		  for the declarative debugger.

	Simon Taylor 
		  
		- has been working on Aditi nondet joins and on
		  calling Mercury code from Aditi.

		- still no estimated release date for Aditi, but will
		  be released RSN.

		- Fergus asked Simon to post his current code for
		  calling Mercury from Aditi since it may be
		  helpful for Levi to look at for his planned work of
		  calling Mercury from the bytecode debugger.

	David Jeffery :

		- Has been working on integrating a new constraint
		  solver into HAL.

	Zoltan Somogyi :

		- has just finished his marking.  Congratulations to
		  him for that and to Adrian for getting the top mark
		  in 313.

	Fergus Henderson :

		- has spent time with the summer students.

		- has been looking at compiling Mercury for the lcc
		  and cc compilers with both the LLDS and MLDS back
		  ends.  Targetting lcc seems to be broken even though
		  Peter Ross got it working a few months ago.  It was
		  decided to set up a machine to run its nightly tests
		  using lcc to prevent future software rot.
		  
		- has been looking at the new features of GCC:
			- found 6 bugs which he reported to the GCC
			  maintainers.
			- GCC's new integrated CPP should be useful
			  for reducing compilation times with the LLDS
			  back end.
			- GCC's improved tailcall optimisation looks
			  promising.  Fergus suggested (to the GCC
			  mailing list) adding an extension to GCC to
			  tell it when it was safe to do a tailcall.
			  Some of the GCC developers liked this idea
			  and some didn't.

		- has added a check to the bootcheck scripts to make
		  sure `MR_' prefixes occur wherever they should.

	David Overton :

		- finished marking exams on Tuesday

		- is looking into problems related to mode checking
		  and types with user defined equality.  Is planning
		  to look at the options for what to do about this --
		  will need to be discussed, probably at the next
		  meeting.

		- is working on updating and tidying up mtags.

	Levi Cameron :

		- Planning to work on adding bytecode queries to the
		  Mercury debugger.  Has started looking at Bert
		  Thompson's work on the bytecode interpreter.

	Ina Cheng :

		- Planning to develop a SOAP interface for Mercury.
		  Has been doing background reading and looking at the
		  current Mercury CGI interface.  Has developed some
		  XML samples to be added to the repository.

	Julien Fischer :

		- Planning to work on the Java backend.

	Simon Mei :
	
		- Planning to work on a ``quickcheck''-style test
		  generator.

	Sam Thurairatnam :

		- Planning to work on the pretty printer.

	Adrian Pellas-Rice 

		- Planning to work on sequence quantification.
	
2. Discussions about the release

	There was a discussion about when we will be ready to freeze
	the compiler (i.e. create a release branch) and what needs to
	be done before that.

		- Tyson would like to get `:- external' working for
		  the IL backend.  Will commit all he has done (with
		  non-working bits commented out) before the freeze
		  and backport the working version into the release
		  branch some time before the release.  Zoltan wants
		  the IL backend to be working for the release.

		- Zoltan has a couple of outstanding bugs, including
		  one in the new LLDS code generator.

		- Fergus mentioned an outstanding bug with
		  bootstrapping in grade asm_fast.gc.par.  Cause of
		  this bug is unknown.  Current workaround is to use
		  hlc.gc.par instead.

		- Ina would like to get her XML samples commited.

	It was decided we would aim to create the release branch late
	on Monday afternoon (4 Dec).

Minutes taken by David Overton .