We had a meeting of the Mercury group on Fri June 22, 2001, from 3.15pm to 5.30pm. Attendees: Fergus Henderson (fjh) Zoltan Somogyi (zs) Simon Taylor (stayl) David Overton (dmo) Mark Brown (dougl) Peter Stuckey (pjs) 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): - Talked about what he had been doing in Redmond, including learning about: Visual Studio integration, Windows installation programs (e.g. InstallShield), and CodeDom. He also attended a meeting of the ECMA standards committee for the CLS. - Will be reviewing submissions to Babel for the next few weeks. Zoltan Somogyi (zs): Has been working on: - display of arrays in the debuger and changes to the type-related utilitities in std_util. - cosmetic changes and bug fixes for the deep profiler. We had a discussion about what features people would find useful in the deep profiler user interface. Simon Taylor (stayl): Has been working on: - smart recompilation - moving mmake functionality into the compiler - higher-order optimisations, focussing on Tom's parser combinators. David Overton (dmo): - Has been marking exams (i.e. no work on Mercury this week). Mark Brown (dougl): - Has been working on an IL to IL transformation for "retry". - Has been studying the .net debug API. Peter Stuckey (pjs): - Has been reading about region-based memory management. We had a discussion about the pros and cons of adding this to Mercury. Summary: it would be too hard to add alongside the Boehm GC, but could work well alongside an accurate GC for some kinds of programs. However, since the accurate GC is still not finished, any development effort that becomes available should go towards that first. Minutes taken by David Overton (dmo@cs.mu.oz.au)