Here’re pointers to Mercury related resources, in no particular order. If you have comments or resources to include, I’d like to hear from you. My email address is post at volker-wysk dot de. Or write to the mercury-users mailing list.
There are the following additional pages, which are also linked further down:
“The Mercuy team collects all [official] Mercury documentation in a central place. Here it is.”
The samples directory in the Mercury source code distribution contains examples for diverse parts
of the language. The README.md file is an overview.
For your convenience I’m including the HTML-version of the README file here. It’s from the 2023-08-15 Release Of The Day of the Mercury compiler.
A page about Mercury limitations.
“The current implementation does not yet completely implement the Mercury language. The main limitations of the current implementation are the following.”
https://plasmalang.org/docs/dev_mercury_grades.html
This is a series of (long) blog posts, which range from March to December 2011. Paul Bone writes: “There’s also the blog series, not mine, but more “here’s how to” style writing for Mercury is always good.” The “labels” at the right are a sort of a table of contents.
http://adventuresinmercury.blogspot.com/
This are documents meant for developers of the Mercury compiler.
Mercury_(programming_language)
Zetian has written a beginner’s introduction to Mercury. It is planned to be the beginning of a book. It’s meant to be “a new tutorial, in which I attempt to present the language core concepts in a way that will not be too alienating”. There’s also a PDF version available.
The standard libraries should be first place to look for libraries. They are documented in the Mercury Library Reference Manual (see Documentation, above).
The “extra libraries” are distributed with the Mercury source code. They are in the extras
subdirectory. It consist of 35 libraries (as of 2022-11-24), that are being held up-to-date with
respect of the latest Mercury compiler. See the README files for documentation.
For your convenience I’m including the HTML-version of the README file here. It’s from the 2023-08-15 Release Of The Day of the Mercury compiler.
Ondrej has put together some Mercury libraries and called that the Mercury Anarchy Archive. The web site has last been updated in 2007, but it’s still up: https://manarchive.sourceforge.net/
However, the subversion download no longer works. So I’m hosting it here (with Ondrej’s consent): manarchive-code-r84.zip.
It consists of the following packages:
hugemap: “An implementation of map that need not fit in RAM based on tinycdb.”ice-mercury: “Ice is apparently some linkage of some Ice programming language.”lib_tools: A collection of code that is meant to complement the standard libraries.maxent_mint: “A maximum entropy classifier, classical machine learning tool.”posix: “A Mercury interface to some of the POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) APIs.”
This is (seems
like) an extended version of the POSIX “extra” library in the Mercury source distributions. It should be
merged with that.tinycdb: “A very efficient constant database. You feed it with pairs and finalize it, then you
can search it, but intended for huge collections.”Julian Fondren <jfondren at minimaltype dot com> has written some Mercury code which he shares. It’s on his Github page. As of 2022-11-24, this consists of the following projects.
mmc-get and the (badly named) “Packages” website have been an
approach to set up a Mercury packages database and distribution system. It consist of libraries,
tools and other programs such as games. This system seems to be abandoned now. I’ve tried to compile
the mmc-get program, but this failed. However, the following are the libraries which are
registered there, excluding the ones which are mentioned elsewhere in this collection.
A human-readable form of the full mmc-get database is here. It’s long, so I’ve placed on a separate page.
This is a “benchmarking wrapper around getrusage”. See https://github.com/jrfondren/getr-mercury.
This is a little program that downloads and displays documentation from mercurylang.org. See https://github.com/jrfondren/mmc-doc.
Colipa is a command line parser library. The design goals are:
It’s hosted on Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/volkerwysk/colipa.
This is a library which lets you access SQL databases over ODBC. It’s derived from the ODBC “extra” library, but a lot has changed. Most notably, it supports multiple threads now.
It’s hosted here: https://gitlab.com/volkerwysk/odbc.
Julien Fischer has 9 Mercury libraries and library bindings on his Github page, as of 2022-11-24. There are libraries for the JSON and CSV formats, bindings of Java things, a library of additional integer types, miscellaneous utilities and more.
This is some general-purpose code which he (that’s me) has written over time. It supplements the standard libraries. It’s available here: msupp - Mercury Supplementary Library.
Sean Charles has 51 projects (as of 2023-08-18) on his Github page, some of which are Mercury related:
nano editor to work with the
Mercury programming language.”foo.m and
there exists a foo.err, that contents of the error file are loaded, parsed and then placed into
the source buffer at the lines specified by the starting block of errors.”Sebastian Godelet has a huge lot of Github projects. Amongst them is a Unicode character database parser and library for Mercury.
They haven’t tested these in a while, but this are libraries that Mission Critical opensourced:
An “OGG decoder library with no foreign code (used in the audio player demo)”: https://github.com/FlyingJester/fjogg
AlaskanEmily of Transnat Games, has released the following code:
Demonstration of constraint solving/graph optimization using multi
determinism code, useful as a basis for pathfinding in particular:
https://osdn.net/users/alaskanemily/pf/Resistors/wiki/FrontPage
Full code demonstration of opening and playing an ogg/opus file in Mercury: https://github.com/AlaskanEmily/audio_player
A simple Java class that lets you use Mercury lists as sequences in Clojure: https://github.com/AlaskanEmily/Merjure
TransUnit unit testing and mocking library, I’ve used this heavily in my game engine and other libraries and projects: https://osdn.net/projects/transunit/
mmath 2D/3D/Matrix math and algebra library: https://osdn.net/users/alaskanemily/pf/mmath/wiki/FrontPage
Saffron Graphics Framework (2D and 3D renderer for OpenGL on Windows and Unix), including a TGA image reader that has no foreign dependencies, bindings for Win32 (Cygwin and MSVC) and GLX/X11, and input handling. Still pre-release, but has been used in a few of my tech demos: https://osdn.net/users/alaskanemily/pf/Saffron/wiki/FrontPage
Aggregates: bag and set aggregates for Mercury
“This is a module to provide bag and set aggregates for Mercury.
“The motivation for this module is to provide aggregates that are comparable to aggregates provided by Prolog (e.g. XSB and SWI-Prolog) and Datalog (e.g. Soufflé). This suggests working with nondeterministic predicates rather than other data structures.
“This is an exploratory exercise, so that the API is likely to change. In particular, the current API and implementations for the bag_row_number and bag_cum_sum window functions are experimental.”
Mark Clements has written a Mercury module that does Automatic differentiation, including both backwards and forwards differentiation. The module adapts an approach used in https://github.com/qobi/AD-Rosetta-Stone/, with a purely functional implementation.
See mercury-ad: Mercury module for automatic differentiation (on Github) for the code, documentation and some examples.
“I have written a Mercury-only implementation of the Mersenne Twister random number generator. This is a very common and reasonably good pseudo random number generator. For details: https://github.com/mclements/mercury-mt.”
“The sqlite3 module is a modest extension of the pushpull.sqlite3 module from the pushpull module by Peter Wang.”
https://github.com/mclements/mercury-sqlite3
“pushpull is a bidirectional IMAP/Maildir synchronisation tool. It synchronises one IMAP folder with one Maildir folder, then optionally waits for a change to either the IMAP folder (using the IDLE command) or to the Maildir folder (using the inotify API) before synchronising again.”
https://github.com/wangp/pushpull
Mark has released a module that implements an event-oriented discrete event simulation:
https://github.com/mclements/mercury-des
See here at Wikipedia about what a discrete event simulation is.
About code that isn’t libraries or tools.
The mmc-get database contains, apart from libraries and tools, also some other code. See above.
Docker is a cross-platform method of sandboxing, packaging and distributing software. See here for an introduction.
Fabrice Nicol is compiling and distributing the Mercury Compiler on a daily basis and is distibuting it as Docker images. This means you don’t need to compile the compiler yourself, when you want the latest and greatest version, and you have set up Docker on your system.
Each Docker image contains both, the latest ROTD version and the latest Git version. He provides three versions of his Docker images, named gentoo4mercruy, ubuntu4mercury and alpine4mercury, which correspond to the Linux distribution with the respective name inside the Docker container.
The Gentoo distribution is aimed at users who want to build dependencies from source code. The Alpine distribution is aimed at those who would like to test builds against the musl C library or need a more compact image.
If you use these images as intended, you will have your entire development environment inside the container. This applies to your source code, the compiler and other tools, the documentation and extra libraries (Mercury ones and other) which you have installed. It’s much like a virtual machine. You develop inside the container. You should make a bind mount (with the “-v” option), so you can get things in and out of the container.
The Nix technology is quite involved and very powerful.
Nix is a package manager for Unix-like systems. It’s based on a purpose-built, declarative, purely functional programming language, in which package receipes are written. These receipes are used to configure packages.
They are collected in the Nixpkgs repository. This is the main package repository built upon the Nix package manager. It contains more than 122,000 packages and has a higher number of up-to-date packages than any other package repository.
NixOS is a Linux distribution based on Nix.
See the Nix (package manager) and NixOS pages in Wikipedia for more information.
Frank Wijnans has written a so-called flake for the Mercury extra libraries.
It’s located here: https://github.com/frank87/mercury_flake.