Hi all,<br>I'm one of the developer of Hedgewars, an open source video game all written with FreePascal. Please see the full site at <a href="http://www.hedgewars.org/">http://www.hedgewars.org/</a><br><br>One of the Hedgewars project is to make a WebGL/Javascript version of the game so that it can run in a browser. To do that we are using a tool named 'emscripten' which takes LLVM bytecode and generates Javascript, without affecting performance too much. Yes, we had to write a horribly hacked converter that took the small subset of Pascal used by Hedgewars and convert it to C (on a side node, the converter is written in Haskell) and reimplement the RTL.<br>
<br>So, this got the job done (if you are using an old browser the demo might still work <a href="http://hedgewars.org/hwjs/hwjs.html">http://hedgewars.org/hwjs/hwjs.html</a> ) but all this process is *highly* unmaintainable and very prone to breakage. So the right way (tm) to achieve this result would be to directly integrate LLVM bytecode generation inside Freepascal.<br>
<br>I think we could make this work
thanks to the Google Summer of Code! This program (*if* they announce
it) basically introduces students to the world of FOSS development by
having them work on projects for an open source organization during the
summer.<br><br>I don't know if Freepascal wants to participate on its own, but if not, if there is one or more developer willing to act as mentor for the students, Hedgewars (*if* selected) would happily allocate some of its
students to work on this task and act as a "umbrella" for this
project targeting Freepascal sources. Of course the students would still have
to write a sensible project proposal for being accepted.<br><br>What do you think of this idea?<br>Unfortunately I do not know Freepascal sources much and cannot fully evaluate the load of work, but I still think that we could collaborate on this level. Also do not underestimate the skills of GSoC students, the demo I posted above was compiled by one of them.<br>
<br>Cheers,<br>Vittorio (koda on #hedgewars)<br>