Editing Mercury (programming language) (section)

==Back-ends==
Mercury has several back-ends, which enable compiling Mercury code into several languages, including:

===Production level===
* Low-level [[C (programming language)|C]] for [[GNU Compiler Collection]] (GCC), the original Mercury back-end
* High-level C
* [[Java (programming language)|Java]]
* [[C Sharp (programming language)|C#]]

===Past===
* [[Assembly language]] via the GCC back-end
* Aditi, a deductive database system also developed at the [[University of Melbourne]]. Mercury-0.12.2 is the last version to support Aditi.{{citation needed|date=January 2014}}
* [[Common Intermediate Language]] (CIL) for the [[.NET Framework]]
* [[Erlang (programming language)|Erlang]]

Mercury also features a foreign language interface, allowing code in other languages (depending on the chosen back-end) to be linked with Mercury code. The following foreign languages are possible:
{| class="wikitable"
! Back-end !! Foreign language(s)
|-
| C (both levels)
| [[C (programming language)|C]]
|-
| Java
| [[Java (programming language)|Java]]
|-
| Erlang
| [[Erlang (programming language)|Erlang]]
|-
| IL
| [[Common Intermediate Language]] (CIL) or [[C Sharp (programming language)|C#]]
|}

Other languages can then be interfaced to by calling them from these languages.  However, this means that foreign language code may need to be written several times for the different backends, otherwise portability between backends will be lost.

The most commonly used back-end is the original low-level C back-end.