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Turbo Pascal 6.0 (vs. others) (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 23.02.2020, 01:32

> For smaller projects is TP7 perfect.
But (mostly) only if you target DOS or compatibles (not Win64!), which is rare these days (no native DOS installs, usually, Win9x is long dead [2006]).

"Small" [sic] is debatable since "Large" model and 640k limit on .EXE size isn't what I'd call trivial (not to mention overlays). The cmdline compiler itself is "small" compared to many things, but I wouldn't call it trivial.

> It is really ultrafast compiler and has ultrafast and stable IDE with nice debugger.
It does less optimizations. It's also a single Pascal dialect for a single host/target architecture. It's also one-pass with a built-in linker. It can easily fit in your cpu's L1 (or maybe L2 or L3) cache.

> FPC is slower - the compiler itself and the IDE too.
PPCROSS8086.EXE (3.0.4 2017/10/07) is "only" 2 MB.

Compiling a simple (nine-file, 597 line) program on Win7 64-bit takes 4.3 secs. ("ppcross8086 inv") because it's smartlinking the "old" way. (Newer snapshots not using NASM or WLINK are faster.) Trying again takes 4.0 secs. Using "-CX-" takes only 0.5 secs. (Apparently FPC.CFG has both "-CX" and "-XX" enabled by default. Maybe only the latter is truly forcibly needed??)

What's your build environment? What's the biggest bottleneck? Memory? Disk? CPU?

Don't smartlink (-CX-) or strip (-Xs) or optimize (beyond -O1) when doing everyday, mundane development and testing. Save that for final releases.

The main (naive) suggestion would also be to run atop RAM disk and with software cache loaded.

> Also don't forget that we don't have any decent sound library for FPC-GO32V2.
Like what? Old stuff like DUMB or Allegro?? There's bound to be wrappers somewhere, but modern hardware is anathema to DOS sound, mostly.

Lacking proper sound support or documentation (or developers!) hurts more. Sound is easily one of modern DOS's weakest link. Then again, I'd say it's less crucial than almost all other things.

> And we don't have the crosscompilling FPC-GO32V2 host -> FPC-DOS16 target.
The Win32 binaries can run under Japheth's HX, so that's better than nothing, obviously.

> However I could agree that there is no reason to prefer 16-bit protected
> mode from BP7 over 32-bit PM from FPC.
Popular target architectures and target OSes lean more heavily against 286 than they did back in 1993. Even 32-bit is somewhat "long in the tooth" and ignored.

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