A few times now people had reported that Plasma wouldn’t build with Mercury 14.01.1 which is the Mercury version we said we were compatible with. To prevent this from happening again, and also to ensure we test with both gcc and clang C we’ve setup continuous integration.

Although now Mercury 14.01.1 is the previous Mercury release since 20.01 and 20.01.1 are now available. So Plasma is no-longer compatible with Mercury 14.01.1, nevertheless, it’s nice to know exactly what it works with at any time.

CI is also used to run an error-checking mode of the garbage collector and run with PZ_DEV both defined and undefined.

In the future we’d like to test across different operating systems and CPU architectures.

To support CI we made some docker images containing Mercury and other Plasma dependencies. The CI system uses these to perform its builds and tests.

It was a small amount of extra work to build a more general Dockerfile (requires other files in the directory) and docker image for Plasma development or testing.

This is based on Debian Linux and the Mercury packages for Debian, it includes various other tools such as git and vim. Vim is configured with syntax highlighting for Mercury and Plasma.

As always, feedback is welcome, file bugs if you find problems or have suggestions.