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FreePascal v1.0 Released
A huge number of people wrote in to say that FreePascal, the BP 7.0 and Delphi compatible compiler finally has an official release. Check it out at http://www.freepascal.org to get version 1.0.
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Anyone who does project management on large projects will find out that C and C++ requires more qualified programmers and up to three times as many programming hours than Inprise Delphi.
.exe file (on Windows), that doesn't need special DLL's to be installed.
I have used Pascal since Compas Pascal, which was the successor to Nascom Pascal (was it 4KByte?), and predecessor to PolyPascal, Turbo Pascal, Borland Pascal and then Delphi.
Having done several projects in C, C++, several assemblers, Visual Basic etc., there is no doubt, that Pascal makes quality control in large projects much easier, and the fact, that the linker is not technology from the 1970's really improves productivity and encapsulation.
I guess that I write approx. 20-40.000 lines of code a year, which would compare to the double in C++ lines. FPC makes me able to do open-source development using this fabulous language, even before Inprise puts out Delphi for Linux.
The traditional problem with Pascal is, that it tends not to be cross-platform. The good thing is, that you can make the same program three times with the same efforts as it would take to do it in C++ - and that alone justifies its use.
Delphi is the full-blown compiler, with which you can write a 10-table database GUI program in one day, where the final program will only be one
Geez....we just got done freeing Mitnick and now we gotta free Pascal? When will this end!?
"My religion is to live --and die-- without regret." -- Milarepa
With a name like FreePascal, couldn't the "release" have waited until Bastille Day?
We are indeed no (L)GPL specialists, but the modification to the LGPL we've done is that we allow static linking under Dos (because, afaik, you normally are forced to dynamically link against LGPL libraries dso the user can upgrade the libraries seperately from the program). Dynamical linking under Dos is even supported yet afaik...
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Now that version 1.0 is finally out of the door, work continues on at least two versions:
- one is pretty much the logical evolution of 1.0: no big structural changes, but lots of extra features like Delphi interfaces support (including COM/CORBA), a much improved optimizer etc.
- the other one will include a completely rewritten code generator so it becomes as much processor independent as possible, with initial ports to at least the i386, PowerPC and Alpha (m68k probably too).
The latter has still a loooooooooong way to go though.--
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Knowing this was going to come down soon, I decided to head down to my local computer book store to pick up some guidance. My discovery? No pascal books. However I did find the following:
1. "C++ for C programmers"
2. "Java for C++ programmers"
3. "Visual Basic for the Java Savvy"
4. "From BASIC to VisualBASIC in 43 Days!"
5. "Oh No, Pascal! A guide to Pascal for BASIC programmers" (discount bin)
$250 later, I'm all set! Who says you can't leverage your skills in C in the modern programming paradigm?
2 1337 4 u!
FWIW, you'll find that the optimizer in 1.0 is probably not much better than in the previous version you tried. If you want to try the new optimizer, get an optcomplinux.tar.gz snapshot (from the development section of the website) and use that in conjunction with -OG3p3 or -OG3p3r)
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The Lazarus IDE it in pretty good shape, with quite a few developers working on the code (and I suspect that this article will help attract qutie a few other people as well).
One of the things that we are in desperate need of is a good mirror of the Lazarus site. The main server site is pretty good... if it is up. With Free Pascal being slashdotted right now I'm sure that the Lazarus site has died if for no other reason than the total number of people who are logged on. Even the CVS server for Free Pascal has been slashdotted. If you can get onto the web site, there are some screen captures posted of some of the user interface, as it is currently developed.
If you get on the CVS server for Free Pascal (in a couple of days after this traffic has died down a little bit) you can get the latest source code for Lazarus from the lazarus subdirectory of the cvs tree. I also got a couple of binaries I've compiled for Windows '98 that look pretty good.
Lazarus is still in fundimental development right now with core visual components being developed (like the TForm and how we are going to store the equivalent of a dfm file is still up to debate in the mailing list).
You can currently create apps using the command-line compiler and lazarus components, and the ability to drag and drop components onto a form is almost ready. As Lazarus is heavily dependent on GTK, development in the Windows environment is going to be strongly linked to the GTK development for Windows. In terms of Linux functionality, there doesn't seem to be any major problems. Just a lot of spit and polish.
On the whole, this is a pretty good environment and in roughly a year or so I think you will see Lazarus take off and really do some neat things. They seem to have picked up the pieces of the old Medigo project rather well, and the fact that there is even a working protype and mock-up of the IDE interface successfully running should be considered a good sign. If you know Pascal or want to see a strong GPL'd GUI development system, stay persistant and try to get connected with Lazarus.
There are also some strong connections between the Free Pascal developers and the Lazarus developers (with some people working on both), so if you keep a book mark on the Free Pascal site you should be able to stay in touch with Lazarus as well.
I haven't really used pascal in a while but I do the bulk of my windows development work in Delphi and love it to bits.
:)
Sadly of late i've not had the time to actually get round to finishing prorgams properly but in delphi I managed to write a functional gnutella client (connected to servers & performed searches) in the space of one evening - and it was fully multithreaded and could maintain up to 255 server connections and as many searches at once.
A few years back I worked for a company doing some win31 development in delphi and would have loved to have had a camera on me when I came back to my c++ coding superior on my second day of work to tell him i'd finished what he had reckoned would have been a 2 to 3 week project.
Personally I can't see why there is so much fuss about c++.
I think pascal is the Dr. Pepper of the langauges world
Even that guy at work later became a convert.
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There are four reasons I use Delphi and FreePascal over C++.(some only apply to FreePascal depending on switches)
1. No object instance variables. This means all objects are by referance which means you know when you are creating destroying and copying objects.
I wrote a base object in C++ once that reported when it was created and destroyed. I was horrified when I found out how many objects were created and destroyed automaticly doing relativly trivial operations. I resolved to only use pointers to objects in future in C++.
2. Properties, Delphi properties rock.
3. Published properties, There is no better way to support end-user visible properties of objects than in published properties.
4. 10 seconds for a complete rebuild of a major project.
Of course there are other minor things as well. virtual constructors, sets, nice string support, units instead of header files...
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
>I came across Gnu Pascal Compiler.
>I don't see any reasons for another one
GPC does not seem to serve any useful purpose. It is dog slow to compile, it supports Pascal dialects that were in use a decade ago, but nothing that is up-to-date and modern.
I'll have to try it out again...
:)
:)
The first language I really learned how to code in was Turbo Pascal, somewhere between 5.5-7.0; I probably spent three years in high school just playing around with it, and I'll eventually work some more on BGI/SVGALib(/SDL?) portability.
(BASIC doesn't really count, since they didn't give me *real* subroutines for so long, and was interpreted or produced really crappy executables...)
My experience with FreePascal (or fpk-pascal) before was, although it often offers better compatibility than p2c, I'd still rather use gcc as a back-end. I never got dynamic libraries working, and I had problems porting some of my code due to apparent bugs in writeln(), (hopefully their fault, and fixed by now) and busy-wait loops (surely my fault, from programming for DOS--processes? What are those?).
Also, I wasn't too impressed with the optimizations FreePascal does, but I suppose if I give it some time, it'll get better. It does some simple things really quickly, but I saw at least a 33% speed-up not too long ago in some tightly-nested code I was hacking on just by using p2c+gcc instead....
However, for people still looking for a free Pascal language for DOS, FreePascal is a god-send, and the Linux portability can't hurt.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
As far as I can tell the LGPL is fine for their purposes and poses no problem to commercial projects (which they seem to be a bit confused about in one of their README files).
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.