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Free Pascal 2.2 Has Been Released
Daniel Mantione writes "Free Pascal 2.2 has been released. Several new platforms are supported, like the Mac OS X on Intel platform, the Game Boy Advance, Windows CE and 64-Windows. Free Pascal is now the first and only free software compiler that targets 64-bit Windows. These advancements were made possible by Free Pascal's internal assembler and linker allowing support for platforms not supported by the GNU binutils. The advancement in internal assembling and linking also allow faster compilation times and smaller executables, increasing the programmer comfort. Other new features are stabs debug support, many new code optimizations, resourcestring smart-linking and more."
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
TurboPascal was great. Or is it Delphi now?
I still need a blue screen to write code quickly.
FreePascal is probably the best representation of what Pascal used to be. Unfortunately after years and years of incompetent management, Delphi remains just an empty shell of its former self. The project was tossed around too many times now, shrunk down, and there are no guarantees for how long it'll exist or be sold to unknown 3rd party.
Many companies with active Delphi code projects are porting to FreePascal (other reasons aside from the sad state of Delphi include compatibility with Mac and other platforms).
The "support route" requires more than. a compiler. It requires developers who know both the technology and culture, which are drastically different from those of any other language. Not bad, just different. Which is why Turbo/Delphi/Object/Free Pascal has always been fiercely opposed by management (which doesn't care for nonstandard technology) and fiercely defended by developers (who love its tiny compile cycle and elegant features).
The suits will win in the end, because they're breeding faster. There's not a lot of incentive to become a Pascal expert, because it's perceived as a fringe language. (To some extent, that's a self-fulfilling prophecy, but that doesn't make it any less true.) So there will be fewer and fewer developers who insist on working in Pascal, and always the same number of managers who insist on switching to a "standard" language.
So Pascal is doomed. Yes, they've been saying that for a long time, because it's been true for a long time. Religions don't die quickly.
Personal note: I used to work for Borland and was responsible for documenting a big chunk of the Delphi API. Fell in love with the language during those years. Driven out by the sheer insanity of Borland management. Now I can't bear to work in the language — too depressing.
Thing is with Pascal: it's designed to be very easy to compile. (So CS students could use it for their first stab at writing a compiler; this was before grammar generators made hand-built compilers obsolete.) So compiling only takes one pass, and even that pass executes quickly. Very handy when you're working with an IDE....
Ach. Getting depressed again.
It was doomed, because Borland completely and dramatically misunderstood Linux. We ALL (Well the delphi heads) *WANTED* kylix, and we all collectively where sporting boners when told it 'did' GPL.
What we instead got was a buggy product that appeared to have alot of winelib in it (what the heck was that font thing?), and more to the point, it treated the GPL as if it was shareware. If one got the 'open source' version, which wasn't actually open source, we could make 'gpl' programs only, but by GPL, it meant "Well your program is GPL, but we are going to force a splash screen on your program that says its gpl and suggest updating to the full version." That was insulting as hell, and completely wrote it all off as an option for us.
Borlands problem is the attentiveness it paid the low-end and hobbyist market in the turbo days was completely blown out the window by the time it moved to Kylix. Hobbyists, students and small business MUST be paid attention to, or how the hells a kid supposed to learn your platform. Linux still has a large hobbyist contingent motoring it along, and in fact proved that hobbyist gift culture could power industry and commerce too.
What was really hard, was Delphi coders understood open source well. We loved sites like torry.ru that had huge collections of awesome open source librarys we could mash into our stuff to make our work days easier. In return we often packaged up our own little inventions and put them out there for other coders to use. Thats why we where so excited about kylix. What a let down.
Now of course we are being enticed back in with the 'turbo explorers' ('Hey kids! Its free!').
Except one cant install open source libraries by design. Way to piss on the Fanbase Borland!. Its a shame too. I was looking forward to returning to Delphi after all those years. Us hobbyists are still out in the cold.
I just hope people put some support into finally getting Lazarus and Free Pascal 'finished'. Its 95% there, and when that happens, we can finally tell the boss to cancel that Borland subscription, because coders *hate* being taken for granted.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.