[fpc-devel] About ppudump program

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Tue, 22 Jun 2010, Doriano Blengino wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am writing a Freepascal IDE in Linux+GTK2 (using freepascal, of course!). I 
> attach a screenshot for your curiosity, just in case.
>
> At this time I am trying to finish a good auto-completion, so I need to 
> extract symbols from pre-compiled PPUs (especially the runtime standard 
> libraries). Right now I use ppudump(1) to extract symbols, but I could switch 
> in future to the use of ppu.pas. I noticed that different freepascal releases 
> do not share a common PPU file format, so using ppu.pas inside the IDE would 
> force the user to use the same compiler version as the one used to compile 
> the IDE. On the other hand, I noticed that the release 2.4.x is the first one 
> which reports "v100" for a PPU file, which hopefully indicates that future 
> releases could be PPU-compatible...
>
> Now, I would ask an advice: is it better to stick to ppudump, at a price of 
> some reduction in speed, and the risk that its output could change in future, 
> invalidating the IDE parsing routines? Or is it better to use ppu.pas in the 
> IDE, having confidence that ppu.pas will parse PPU file generated by 
> different versions/releases of freepascal?

Well, as far as I know, ppu simply skips blocks that it does not know, 
so I would think it is safe to use.

Michael.