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FPC 2.4.0 released! (Announce)

posted by marcov, 06.01.2010, 22:20

> > 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??

Not much point in it, unless you really build the IDE etc with it, and test it.

> 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.
7.0 final is out for ages? Btw, how does djgpp handle with the python and decimal support of 7.0? This optional stuff lead to problems on Linux with 7.0, since some enable it, and some not.

> IIRC, FP.EXE uses GDB 6.2? Easier to build??)
Those 6.2 libs are handpatched by a GDB coremember over several releases. The said GDB coremember used to be FPC coremember. IOW they are a stability island, but now with the move to dwarf we will have to move on sooner or later.

> > 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.

No. It was only buildable by knowledgable people to begin with.

> Also -TWDOSX
> never seemed to work, and I'm unable to figure out quickly how to enable
> it.

WDOSX is a bit HX like. A modification for the win32 target so that it is runnable on Dos, not a mod of the dos target.

> 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.

Hmm, that should be checked out.

> 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.
Since not used they are ancient, created with ancient procedures etc. Hope to upgrade some before 2.4.2.

> 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
Good. Don't forget to look at the author of that program :-)

> > The docs shrink to 6-10 MBish in CHM form.
>
> That would definitely be nice.

I'll see if I can upload them (even if slightly corrupted) next weekend

>(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.)
I don't see what 7zdecode would be good for in this context. As far as I know 7zdecode is a decompressor for a solid archivetype, not a helpfile system.

And helpfiles are never solid.

> > > 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.

Yes. But now you managed to find a release that I even hate more than 1.0.10 (or well, actually I hate every older than 1.0.10 more than 1.0.10, but I hate 0.99.5 in particular, since it required special code added for *EACH* assembler procedure because it had a bug in the prologue/epilogue code. The are more funky stuff in older 0.99.xes (like cltd<>cdq opcode being renamed several times)

> But I can't find that anywhere either.
Keep it that way.

> 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.)
No it is not that. In general the 1.0 and 2.0 are 5 years apart in one single blow, without any significant inbetween versions. There are 15000 CVS commits inbetween, and heaps of stuff is changed. And most of it for the good, and with reason.

If 2.4 is too big for some strange fruit kind of idiotic passtime, cut down 2.4 sources. Don't mess with older releases. Period.

> Well, AT2's examples were very heavily assembly-oriented, and ignoring the
> useless MemAvail, the main problem was something like @POINTER[].

That might not be a bug. It might be selecting the wrong compiler dialect mode. Modes TP and Delphi follow the borland way, the default(fpc) and objfpc modes require an extra disambiguating @ here and there.

> It was
> geared only towards TMT (long gone)

No still exists. Last release in 2007 or so, as "framework pascal". Even though there were releases after 2000, not much interesting happened though, afaik.

> 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.
Definitely. They are not used much, since most people don't even bother with console or old-school graphic libs.

> > 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.

There was nothing to fix. Most of the problem were design issues of a organically expanded RTL as targets were added.

> Couldn't they borrow parts from GNU Pascal??
First, it wasn't missing parts, but design problems and problematic compiler.

Second, GNU Pascal is general in worse state than FPC, and has much less code (the whole compiler is essentially a patch on gcc), so even if there were missing parts in FPC, you couldn't get much from GPC. Even not if you include C code, since you'd pull in whole GCC, and it would become an unmaintainable mess.

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