April 2014 Project of the Month, Free Pascal | SourceForge Community Blog
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/16
Thanks Olivier SCHWAB for pointing me to this nice interview with Florian Klämpfl on SourceForge about April 2014 Project of the Month, Free Pascal | SourceForge Community Blog.
Two things I didn’t know yet:
- FreePascal started in the Turbo Pascal era (the first version was before Delphi 1.0 got released) as a 32-bit compiler project.
- FreePascal 3.0 will support jvm output (like Oxygene does).
Besides Florian, there are quite a few more people on the FreePascal team. I met most of them at last years PasCon: really nice guys.
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
Thaddy said
I think Florian is overly modest in that interview. The FPC compiler suite provides native compilers for more platforms and architectures than any other pascal compiler ever did. And it did so long before a former industry leader. What is even more amazing is that it – for all intend and purpose – generates vastly superior code compared to XE6 at the time that I write this. Especially on mobile platforms and X86_64.
Due to the very conservative release cycle (much more conservative than commercial offerings) it maybe overlooked that the trunk compiler is mostly sufficiently stable to be used in production, much more so than these commercial offerings even if these are now based on mature open source backends that they were themselves unable to provide ;)
jpluimers said
Nothing wrong with modest people. And thanks for providing this update. Time permitting I will see what the trunk provides.
Thaddy said
I must say there is – finally – improvement going on in the form of stability and fixing bugs at Embarcadero, but I switched to fpc for all server-side development and maintenance based on object pascal about three years ago. And all client-side for Android and Linux. It is that good. I still use Embarcadero products, though. On request and at a price.
KMorwath said
Mmmh, I wonder if he recalls correctly – in 1993 there was no “cheap” 32 bit operating system (but OS/2 1,x and maybe the first NT). Under DOS you required a DOS Extender to use 32 bit features really – not just a compiler – Borland Pascal 7 came with one, otherwise, sure you could so some 32 bit arithmetics, but little more in 640K. Windows 3.x run 32 bit applications, but only Windows ones using Win32s.
It’s also “nice” how it avoids the name “Delphi” all over the interview…
jpluimers said
I am sure he is right. Doom used the 32-bit DOS/4G extender (the free DOS4GW shipped with the Watcom C compiler) when it was released in 1993. I remember that era well (: 32-bit support actually was “late” as the i386 got released in the mid 1980s. Though very popular DOS/4GW wasn’t the first: the 386 DOS by PharLap was first, but less popular.