[fpc-devel] Thank you!

[J. Gareth Moreton]

I'd like to thank Florian, Jonas and Pierre especially for the humbling 
education I have received over the past few months.  The relay and 
eventual rejection of my original x86-64 optimizer overhaul has taught 
me a few things about being too ambitious and also maybe too clever 
sometimes with some optimisations that might subtly backfire later.

After the rejection I selected a piece of the overhaul that was 
relatively independent of everything else but still substantial in its 
own right, and Florian was happy for me to develop that.  My research 
led me to find new optimisations (like the conditional subset thing that 
helped to improve the shortcutting of jump chains) but to also learn how 
to program and test on other platforms, since getting it to work on 
x86_64-win64 was one thing, but having it compile and work on everything 
else was another matter entirely.  MIPS, for example, taught me that how 
one platform handles conditional jumps might be completely different to 
another, and I have to accommodate for that.

I like to think I'm older and wiser when it comes to developing on a 
team now thanks to my experience with the Free Pascal Compiler.  So once 
again, thank you everyone, and I hope to continue contributing for a 
while yet!

Gareth aka. Kit