[fpc-devel] Re: fpc-devel Digest, Vol 112, Issue 32

[Sven Barth]

Am 23.08.2013 02:00 schrieb "Steve" <stevie at collector.org>:

> I would maintain that we restrict ourselves to System/360 assembler; Why?
The
> overwhelming reason for this is audience. Let's face it, Pascal, whatever
the
> dialect or the target is not the most popular language on the planet.
Having
> a decent Pascal Compiler on as many targets, both hardware and OS, as
possible
> is a laudable goal. Free Pascal could easily fulfil that. Limiting the
target
> audience to Linux/390 is, well... limited. (Sorry).  Linux/390 users must
> represent a pretty small gene pool. Many hercules users do not have access
> to environments that support the rinky-dink new instruction set. They run
> old operating systems. Using Assembler F compatible code supports ALL 390
> environments. The same compiler, with a different RTL should work on all
> OS versions. This means finding a common denominator, 360 assemblers are
> available for all IBM environments.

If 360 assembly code can be used on modern processor variants as well I see
no problem with targeting that at first only. The point with using Linux as
a first target is that you would not need to implement a new RTL, but only
the code generator and the processor specific RTL code. The point for
gas/ld was simply that we have existing writers for these two, but writing
your own writers for IBM specific tools isn't rocket science either... But
it's another thing you'd need to implement.

> If we use
> gas/ld we put ourselves in the same situation Delphi landed us in with the
> use of non-standard libraries; Writing individual wrapper functions for
> every other function under the sun.

Would you elaborate what you mean here?

Regards,
Sven
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