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FPC 2.4.0 released! (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 06.01.2010, 18:40

> Not for dos, but we have experimented a lot with 6.8 and even 7.0 on
> windows. When we did this last fall, 2.4.0 was already branched off.
Probably a dumb question, but should I join some FPC mailing list to offer my dumb suggestions?? Or are you forwarding the relevant info to them. (E.g. GDB 6.8 builds with 2.04 only, 7.0-pre builds fine with 2.03p2. IIRC, FP.EXE uses GDB 6.2? Easier to build??)

> > BTW, I guess AS.EXE is still only included for comparison (as it's no
> > longer technically needed, right?).
>
> It is needed for the startup code. (when bootstrapping) and as fallback.
> But probably not used a lot.
I was unable to build Watcom RTL, probably bitrotted a bit. Also -TWDOSX never seemed to work, and I'm unable to figure out quickly how to enable it. It needs relocs, and there at least used to be an option for FPC to generate those, but by default it doesn't seem to. Building the GO32V2 RTL had various warnings (including the infamous "lcall indirect * blah" crapola attributed to newer BinUtils). So I'm halfway guessing it could be old code that expects older BinUtils. Oh, and BTW, apparently you never told them (or they didn't care) that UPXing AS.EXE and LD.EXE makes them run slower on Win32. I've rebuilt 2.17 and 2.19.1, personally, if that helps at all. (But I think 2.19 AS.EXE is bloated. 2.16.1 is probably sufficient, IMHO. IIRC, 2.16 was when LD got --reduce-memory-overheads, and 2.17 is when AS got it. So in theory 2.17 AS might be faster.) Are there any plans to use the built-in linker for GO32V2? Shouldn't be too too hard considering it's also COFF-ish like Win32.

P.P.S. My comment about fpctris being bigger is wrong, I didn't use -Os -CX -Oppentium -XXs. So it's about 65k, IIRC, before UPX (27k afterwards??). However, since 1.0.10 is verboten, any size comparison is moot anyways! :-P

> The docs shrink to 6-10 MBish in CHM form.
That would definitely be nice. (I guess you guys don't want to use 7zdecode since it's not Pascal, only C. But AS and LD and GDB are C also, so you aren't that stubborn.)

> > Is it the compiler proper or RTL or both??
>
> RTL mostly delphi parts. In mostly OS dependant code.
Ah, "mostly" is the key word. Seems that 0.99.5 was the last official release to be TP-compatible only. But I can't find that anywhere either. So if the offending code only related to Delphi, that version could be unearthed, I guess. But I'm probably dreaming too heavily. (Yes, I know, newer versions are better, just slightly buggy. I really don't understand DPMI exceptions, though, so I'm no help there.)

> The 1.9/2.0 series changes the calling conventions from FPC's own
> convention to something more compatible. That is the breaker in most apps
> that interface a lot of dos. Trunk changed in dec 2004 iirc. The advantage
> is that Delphi assembler code now runs mostly unmodified.
Well, AT2's examples were very heavily assembly-oriented, and ignoring the useless MemAvail, the main problem was something like @POINTER[]. It was geared only towards TMT (long gone) and old FPC. Meh. I guess no huge huge loss. Honestly, it's kinda silly he even bothered pretending it's Pascal since it used so little, in reality.

IIRC, Quad (DOS) didn't work even in DOSBox, Mandel (Win32) stayed active even when quit, had to be manually killed. So some of the examples need revisiting.

> Probably old stale links, FTP has been removed afaik (and it hurt me quite
> bad to have to remove the versions that didn't have a newer release like
> 1.0.x only targets and m68k). I'll make a note on my todo list to clean up
> the HTML.
Surprising that no one stepped up to fix the old RTL instead of abandoning them completely. Couldn't they borrow parts from GNU Pascal??

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