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FPC 16-bit (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 17.05.2013, 07:52

> Yes. No doubt about that. (though the itanium bit is a stretch, it is
> pretty much dead for new software development)
"Itanium is dead, x64 wins!" (groan)

I have no idea, but Wikipedia claims it's still going strong, at least through 2017.

> No. Among them they are 99.9% of the software tools usage. Maybe another
> 9.
>
> That's why they are great.
Except for GCC, they are all very narrow in what they target and are ridiculously expensive. GCC's main problem is being too *nix-oriented, which means anything outside of POSIX/ELF and C++ or Fortran isn't very important to them (and tends to bitrot or get removed quickly). But at least they (somewhat) support other stuff at all.

(Heh, just for laughs I wanted to check Gautier's "Lang Index" on SourceForge and also see if similarly TIOBE finally updated for May. I think it's quite funny what they say, and you of all people may find it "interesting".)

> No. Since I might simply use another compiler if I had an extremely tight
> budget.
99% of compilers are expensive. If your budget is tight, you won't have enough money to keep buying more and more compilers. And let me save you the trouble: none are perfect. If you want something bad enough, you'll have to workaround any issues in your tools.

> And then, suddenly the whole 500kb limit is totally arbitrary and reveals
> your dos roots.
Reveals my roots? That was my whole point! The IBM PC grew up with PC-DOS/MS-DOS, and (more or less) we still have such compatibility today, despite many people trying to change (and tightly control) it over the years.

> > Everything else is mostly ignored (including FreeBSD). If certain parts
> of
> > the commercial world weren't so anti-GPLv3, FreeBSD wouldn't exist
> > anymore.
>
> Wrong, since GPLV3 is fairly recent.
Five years is hardly recent. A lot has happened since then.

> FreeBSD has a strong following among
> ISPs. It is not a client OS, so comparing downloads is a bit strange.
> (since that is an end-user centric metric).
I meant third-party projects that explicitly target FreeBSD, not just random *nix compatibility in sources that halfway work. Those binaries have very very low download counts.

> > > > It must be bad because nobody supports DJGPP (32-bit) anymore.
> > >
> > My point was that "32-bit POSIX isn't enough anymore."
>
> DJGPP is POSIX nowadays?
Certified? No, nobody wants to waste the time or money (same as Linux or FreeBSD, from what I hear). And no, it doesn't (can't) support things like 2008 (mmap). My point was that even what is there (1992, parts of 2001) is ignored.

> > So it's not 640 kb,
> > it's not stability, it's not lack of tools, and it's not lack of
> > free/libre: people just don't freaking care anymore.
>
> Well, or simply think that the burden/baton should pass to actual users?
> Maybe there is a nice task for you there :-)
No, because even when it works they don't care.

> > > Yes. ALL FOR THE REQUIREMENTS OF THEIR TIMES !
> >
> > What requirements changed?
>
> The balance that hardware like memory makes in the total cost of software
> development. Hourly programmer rate / unit memory.
Costs always go up, never down. In fact, the free market loves to charge "whatever [it] wants!" So that's not a good measure. (U.S. is too greedy, but outsourcing is lowballing.)

Besides, the whole "RAM is cheap" cliche is a red herring. Nobody can truly install 256 GB or 1 TB anyways, the motherboard is way too limited. Even OSes (e.g. XP 32-bit) can't handle the full amount that the architecture supports, whether for technical or licensing reasons.

> > Apple, IBM, Intel (not ICC), Embarcadero, FreeBSD, Minix all use and
> > support it. There's probably more groups than that, obviously. It's far
> > from dying.
>
> All those wins are on license, not on technical grounds. So....
Faster compilation. Less memory usage. 75%-90% speed of GCC. Better tools support. Good support of standards.

That's far from just licensing (which reminds me, you never hear about PCC anymore. At one time that was seen as the one to follow. Guess nobody cares anymore. Sad, really.)

> > Yes, even
> > your beloved Delphi is rumored to be migrating to LLVM. Then, worse
> > performance or not, you're stuck! Enjoy your upgrade!
>
> Nope. The so called nextgen compiler is still very incompatible (the iOS
> XE4 recently released is based on it).
BTW, dare I say it, but ... is iOS really worth targeting? Well, I guess if something is trendy enough and makes enough money ....

> This because it does more than just LLVM. It also tries to reinvent the
> language on .NET/Java footings, including immutable strings, meaning all
> string routines need to be reviewed/rewritten.
In fairness, Delphi already probably had too many kinds of strings. (And other languages have had immutable strings too, perhaps due to garbage collection, dunno. E.g. Lua and Modula-3.)

> If Embarcadero continue on this course, I'll probably have a few years left
> on my XE3, and then migrate either to MSVC or FPC.
Migrating to MSVC sounds like a bad idea. Even if you loved C++ (since their C support is minimal, i.e. C++ wins over obsolete C), there are many other tools. But maybe you're one of those that can't live without fancy IDEs. That seems to be most people's favorite thing about MSVC. (Well, the console is indeed considered obsolete in many peoples' eyes, part of the reason Windows was promoted so heavily.)

During previous revisions to this post, I deleted some points. But let me exhume one: we are both living in deprecated worlds.

Windows: Win32 GUI (preferred), DOS console (legacy, deprecated)
Linux: GNOME or KDE under X11 (preferred), POSIX console (deprecated)
Mac OS X: Cocoa (preferred), *BSD terminal (deprecated)

So even if there is some compatibility, it's always shunned and ignored by some people. Heck, it may not even work very well or for long because somebody always wants to replace it with something new and fresh and "better". It's not just "intertia". At some point you really have to stabilize on "something" or else nothing will ever get done. And constantly changing the goals of a project to appease every latest trend is not the recipe for success.

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