We had a meeting of the Mercury group on Fri 11 May, 2001.

Attendees:
	Fergus Henderson (fjh)
	Zoltan Somogyi (zs)
	Mark Brown (dougl)
	David Overton (dmo)
	Simon Taylor (stayl)

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.

	Fergus Henderson (fjh):
		- Working on the gcc back-end.
			- Support for nested modules.
			- Support by mmake.
			- The test cases are almost passed, but they
			  still fail when run from the nightly tests
			  script.
			- There is a slight interface change when compiling
			  multiple modules on the one command line, due to the
			  way gcc works.  These are now compiled into one big
			  object file, rather than one per module.  One
			  solution might be to fork mmc before calling
			  gcc, but it may not be worth the effort.
		- Has been trying to sort out intellectual property
		  issues related to changes to the gcc back-end.
		- Noted that problems have been reported with the MacOS
		  port.  Has tested under Linux-PPC and it worked out of
		  the box.
		- Some bug fixes.
		- Partially reviewed the EDCG changes.

	Zoltan Somogyi (zs):
		- Working on removing all nondet pragma C code from the
		  standard library.  A problem came up writing string__append
		  in Mercury: the compiler cannot optimize calls to var/1
		  and nonvar/1 because of impurity.  Two proposed solutions:
		  	- Make them special impure predicates the
			  compiler knows about.
			- Add syntax for multi-moded predicates (Fergus
			  volunteers to do this).
		- Cleaning up and optimizing deep profiling.
		- Finishing the paper on deep profiling.
		- Has made changes to the deep profiler since it was
		  posted for review.  Another diff will be posted soon.
		- Suggested configuration with a conf.m.in.
			- Fergus pointed out that there would be a
			  bootstrapping problem, and we should use
			  conf.c.in instead.
			- Zoltan responded that this problem would not
			  apply to the deep profiler.
		- Disabled value numbering.

	Mark Brown (dougl):
		- Has been working on a paper on the declarative
		  debugger.

	David Overton (dmo):
		- Has been working on the ROBDD implementation.
			- The complexity has improved.
			- Now works in reasonable time on 8-node
			  examples.

	Simon Taylor (stayl):
		- Has been cleaning up the smart recompilation change.
		- Constructing test cases for that change.
		- Reviewing Zoltan's work on deep profiling.

2. Samples/extras on the web pages.

	Anthony Senyard reported that he often searches the web pages
	for something with no result, then when he asks a developer he is
	pointed to an example in the samples or extras directories.  We
	resolved to make the samples and extras accessible from the web
	site, where they would be indexed by htdig (David Overton
	volunteered to do this).

3. Warning on compilation times.

	Users may try to save time by downloading the source instead of
	a binary package, without realising that the compilation time
	might be longer than the download time.  Simon Taylor
	volunteered to put a warning about long compilation times on the
	relevant web page.

Minutes taken by Mark Brown (dougl@cs.mu.oz.au).