However their choice for ISO is a bit unpractical due to Borlands significant rise.
IMHO the choice for gcc also held them back. It is hard to keep up with a commercially supported team that rewrites the whole codebase every two years.
Borland dialects relax the B&D aspect, but keep the overal sane structure.
Everything done in C can be done in FPC, the only practical thing I can think of is that with C you can make large static datastructures easy using preprocessor.
However using an external preprocessor is of course possible with any language.
The reasons for FPC not choosing GCC are manifold.
However besides a fundamental David vs Goliath problem (Please hold of GCC 4.0, I want to do some Pascal patches), none of these have anything to do with the relations between gcc, gpc and FPC teams now, or in the past.
Delphi2005 is dog slow, unstable, and only supports Windows.
Moreover, you already gave a good reason, Delphi is becoming increasingly.NET oriented, and despite the marketing bla, a production app requires heavy porting to.NET.
It's like saying who needs gcc if you have Microsoft VS ?
- The GCC architecture with its LALR parsers is not fit for pascal LL(1) parsing model - GCC has no support for autobuilding. - gcc is dog slow, pascal users used to Borland compilers don't accept that. (autobuilding and separate AS are main reasons for that) - Negotiating with commercially supported GCC teams as a small team is a hassle (can you imagine: please hold of the GCC 4 release, I want to commit some Pascal fixes) - gcc's build process has too many dependancies, and is very complicated.
GNU Pascal tried this, I suggest you try GNU Pascal, and then FPC Pascal, and feel the difference (keeping in mind that GNU Pascal is 6-8 years older)
The compiler itself works with Zaurus. (that's the armlinux port (OZ based)). However the lack of GDB debugging support for OZ is currently the showstopper for further development
Several devels including me own Collies. (Zaurus sl5500g)
>Of course, some open source code is perfectly >welcome in commercial software, even if that >software's code is not itself open; it's no secret >or surprise that Microsoft, for instance, has taken >advantage in some products of BSD-licensed code.
This example (socket code) often pops up, and is often used in GPL advocacy.
Note however that the TCP/IP work was done under a DARPA grant, paid for by the US government, so it is not only legal, but even moral right for Microsoft to use this code.
- as certified geek somehow, a lot of system administration falls to me. Specially firefox advocacy falls in that category. - At work, a sound open source awareness makes it easier for me to bring some OSS components being in, and believe me, and now the manager uses firefox, that is a lot easier.
Slashdot Mirror
To GPC's defence, it is actually older than FPC.
However their choice for ISO is a bit unpractical due to Borlands significant rise.
IMHO the choice for gcc also held them back. It is hard to keep up with a commercially supported team that rewrites the whole codebase every two years.
> Pascal: a dead language. Why the hell are people still using it?
Funny, I was just going to say that about Haskell. Something that never got out of the academic world.
However Pascal has Delphi, a major development tool that is still sells relatively big today. What does Haskell have to compare to that?
That should read: Just
fpc file
however the brackest were interpreted as html probably
Or maybe they didn't use Windows.
(which is in fact true to some extend)
This sounds like a why bother with gcc, just use VS argument.
Moreover look at the state of Linux, where is the Open Source RAD ? IMHO Lazarus is still the closest contestant.
Delphi is still RAD number two after VS. Nuff said :-)
Borland dialects relax the B&D aspect, but keep the overal sane structure.
Everything done in C can be done in FPC, the only practical thing I can think of is that with C you can make large static datastructures easy using preprocessor.
However using an external preprocessor is of course possible with any language.
Moreover, there is a plugin for FPC in Delphi. It is called CrossFPC, and from the same author as CrossKylix.
The reasons for FPC not choosing GCC are manifold.
However besides a fundamental David vs Goliath problem (Please hold of GCC 4.0, I want to do some Pascal patches), none of these have anything to do with the relations between gcc, gpc and FPC teams now, or in the past.
For more reasons, see further below.
People that get caught up in pissing contests typically don't reach 2.0
C is pretty a systems only language.
Free Pascal is targeted at programming applications (since it directly takes after Delphi)
It wasn't tied to an OS that got popular, which was what saved its direct competitor C.
C, unforgiving and terse as it is, obtained a stronghold in systems programming through Unix.
Delphi2005 is dog slow, unstable, and only supports Windows.
Moreover, you already gave a good reason, Delphi is becoming increasingly
It's like saying who needs gcc if you have Microsoft VS ?
Some reasons, there are more:
- The GCC architecture with its LALR parsers is not fit for pascal LL(1) parsing model
- GCC has no support for autobuilding.
- gcc is dog slow, pascal users used to Borland compilers don't accept that. (autobuilding and separate AS are main reasons for that)
- Negotiating with commercially supported GCC teams as a small team is a hassle (can you imagine: please hold of the GCC 4 release, I want to commit some Pascal fixes)
- gcc's build process has too many dependancies, and is very complicated.
GNU Pascal tried this, I suggest you try GNU Pascal, and then FPC Pascal, and feel the difference (keeping in mind that GNU Pascal is 6-8 years older)
The compiler compiled itself on Z once.
The compiler itself works with Zaurus. (that's the armlinux port (OZ based)). However the lack of GDB debugging support for OZ is currently the showstopper for further development
Several devels including me own Collies. (Zaurus sl5500g)
That blog entry is a waste of perfectly good bits.
While FPC is not as old as GPC (an eighties GNU project), it still has a venerable age. It went 1.0 in 2000, which also made slashdot.
FPC is way more workable than GPC
The project itself uses makefiles to stitch libraries together, and as a kind of scripting to propagate all kind of build environments.
Normal build processes are autobuilding. Just fpc . Even in the custom compiler bootstrap, the compiler compiles itself in one go
I can vaguely remember this being on Slashdot before. Though then it was iirc a AMD 5x86 on 160MHz or so.
Mutt is not as userfriendly as ELM.
Conclusion of this study: it is worthwhile to patch the packages of a distro so that it submits distro name. It well get your higher stats.
I miss the ppc distro's btw and Knoppix.
Is really nobody my fav email client anymore.
Grr, and Windowmaker dropped too:_)
No because Microsoft pays taxes.
>Of course, some open source code is perfectly >welcome in commercial software, even if that >software's code is not itself open; it's no secret >or surprise that Microsoft, for instance, has taken >advantage in some products of BSD-licensed code.
This example (socket code) often pops up, and is often used in GPL advocacy.
Note however that the TCP/IP work was done under a DARPA grant, paid for by the US government, so it is not only legal, but even moral right for Microsoft to use this code.
2 reasons:
- as certified geek somehow, a lot of system administration falls to me. Specially firefox advocacy falls in that category.
- At work, a sound open source awareness makes it easier for me to bring some OSS components being in, and believe me, and now the manager uses firefox, that is a lot easier.