README.MS-Windows

This file documents the port of Mercury to MS Windows.

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Supported versions of Windows
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Mercury has been tested with the following versions of Windows:

    * Windows 7
    * Windows 10

We no longer actively maintain support for older versions of Windows.

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Building Mercury on Windows
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The Mercury build process requires the use of a number of Unix tools such as sh
and make.  This means that a Unix emulation environment is required to build
Mercury on Windows.

Three such environments are supported:

1. Cygwin (www.cygwin.com).  See README.Cygwin.

2. MSYS (www.mingw.org).  See README.MinGW.

3. MSYS2 (msys2.github.io).  See README.MinGW.

Mercury can also be built using the MS Visual C compiler, although one of
the above environments is still required for the build process.  See 
README.MS-VisualC for instructions on how to build Mercury with the 
MS Visual C compiler.

NOTE: while a Unix emulation environment is required to build Mercury on
Windows, one is NOT required to use Mercury on Windows.

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Building Mercury for Windows on Linux
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Alternatively, you can cross-compile Mercury on Linux with a MinGW
cross-compiler.  See README.MinGW-cross.

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Using Mercury on Windows
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On Windows systems the usual name for the Mercury compiler, mmc, conflicts with
the name of the executable for the Microsoft Management Console.  See the
"Using the Mercury compiler" chapter of the Mercury Users's Guide for how to
deal with this.