Future of Ergo and XSB

[Marc Petit-Huguenin]

Hi,

I have been using Ergo for a few years now and I reached a point where I found enough bugs in both Ergo and XSB that I have to decide if it is worth spending the time fixing them or giving up.

On the one hand the recent paper “Multi-paradigm Logic Programming in the ErgoAI System” seems to indicates that Ergo has a future.  On the other hand the fact that the XML parser does not handle Unicode (but its swi-prolog equivalent can) is not very reassuring.  But my main concern is that it seems that there is a lot of memory issues (memory violation, memory leaks...), the kind that requires much effort to debug and fix.

So I'd like to hear what the members of this group think about that.

Thank you.

[Theresa Swift]

There have been some personal issues that have prevented Michawl from updating Ergo and me from updating XSB as much as we would like.  The good news is that we've gotten some funding to fix bugs and make enhancements, so I think that things will get a little bit more back on track. I hope so.

In terms of XML parsing, in XSB we've pretty much gone over to using Python libraries through Janus.  Janus is also easy to use from Ergo, at least if Ergo/XSB is calling Python.  I haven't used that particular library with Janus myself, but I don't see why it shouldn't work.

In terms of SWI, my eventual goal is to get Ergo running on SWI, which is also a goal of Jan's.  We actually have worked together for several years, and SWI has implemented most of XSB's tabling, as well as Janus.  (SWI's implementation is really good.)  Unfortunately, there isn't any funding presently to get Ergo onto SWI, but I am hopeful we can at some point and there are some distinct possibilities.

Have the memory issues been reported?

Anyway, sorry about the troubles.  Both Ergo and XSB are immensely complicated systems, and it certainly is hard to keep them going.  We do our best, which is sometimes enough, but not always.

Theresa

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[Marc Petit-Huguenin]

Thank you Theresa for that response.  The funding is great news.

I did not see the jns_xmldict module in Janus, so I am going to try that.

As for the memory issues, I was not sure where to report that as I filled a couple last year at https://github.com/ErgoAI/ErgoEngine/issues but never got any feedback.  Where should XSB and/or Ergo issues be reported? Same question for patches for XSB and/or Ergo.

Thanks.